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Testimonial emotions: witnessing and feeling the 1990s in South Korean women's literature and film

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Testimonial emotions: witnessing and feeling the 1990s in South Korean women's literature and film

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Content Testimonial Emotions:
Witnessing and Feeling the 1990s in South Korean Women’s Literature and Film
by
Hayun Cho
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES)
August 2024
Copyright 2024 Hayun Cho

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Dedication
For my beloved family and friends.

iii
Acknowledgments
Writing this dissertation, I have reckoned with the trials and pleasures of work which
turns out to not be very solitary at all. Looking back at the time I poured into earning my
doctorate, I understand that these pages have materialized because I have been surrounded by
interlocutors who possess unwavering faith in me as a scholar and person. I turn to these people
with the utmost gratitude, and I hope they understand that words can only begin to express how
indebted I am to their intellectual and emotional generosity.
My heartfelt gratitude to my advisor Sunyoung Park, who was the first to welcome me
with open arms to the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at USC. She has taught
me what it means to write with conviction and to be a thorough and patient researcher. I have
benefitted immensely from Sunyoung’s mentorship and knowledge of Korean studies.
Youngmin Choe’s questions regarding my research as well as my practice as a scholar artist have
been foundational to thinking through why I am invested in what I do. Our conversations on
autotheory and errantry especially have shaped my third and fourth chapters. I am grateful for
Youngmin’s mentorship, compassion, and encouragement. Brian Bernards has been incredibly
supportive of my at times experimental explorations into unthinking mastery, and his support has
been foundational to honing my scholarly instincts in order to think boldly and to stay with what
moves me. I am grateful for Brian’s brilliant mentorship and the emotional and intellectual
generosity he brings to academia. Neetu Khanna’s mentorship and solidarity have been a source
of great inspiration throughout the writing of this dissertation. I have learned so much about
feminist practice from her, and how curiosity and joy are vital for such a practice.
I am also grateful to the faculty and staff I have had the privilege of working with at the
University of Southern California who have been integral to my scholarly growth. My gratitude

iv
to David Bialock, Brianna Correa, Thomas Gustafson, Jungeun Hong, Joy Kim, Natania Meeker,
Christine Shaw, Satoko Shimazaki, Karen Tongson, Julianne Vu, and Kerim Yasar. I am
especially grateful to Christine Shaw for providing me with generous departmental support when
I most needed it. It was my great fortune to meet Natania Meeker during the final stages of this
dissertation. Natania has been a generous interlocutor of my work, especially my second chapter,
and auditing her seminar during my final year at USC has been nothing short of a revelation. Her
support has helped me articulate renewed passion for academic work which, in her own words, is
never individual but always shared. My sincere thanks to the USC Graduate School, the Korean
Studies Institute, the Center for Transpacific Studies, the Social Science Research Center, and
the Korea Foundation for the invaluable research support that made this project possible.
My dear friends in Los Angeles have held me steady throughout my PhD journey. I
would first like to thank my wonderful EALC cohort, Lindsay Jolivette and Xuejing Sun, for
their friendship and solidarity. Melissa Chan welcomed me to LA with rides, eats, and warm
hugs. Mina Kaneko has been a true friend to me and our conversations have given me
perspective and courage. Ka Lee Wong, fellow water sign sister and confidante, has been a
constant throughout the ups and downs of PhD life. Our many healing rituals and artist dates will
carry me through to the next chapter. Tammy Young’s steadfast comradery and faith in me has
made life sweet in southern California. I am not sure where I would be without our walks, chats
in the kitchen, and nights out on the town.
I would also like to thank my dear friends scattered across the East Coast who have
supported me long before these years at USC: Enid Burrows, KZ, Cathy Shen, Lining Wang, and
Jess Yuan. Special thanks to Lining Wang for their kindness, generosity, and creativity which

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never cease to inspire me. I would not be here without Cathy Shen, my partner in crime and soul
sister. Thank you for seeing me and being on this journey with me.
I turn to my family with profound gratitude. Everything I write is for you. You have
made this life possible for me. This is for my mother Mehyun, the first theorist I encountered.
Her love and sacrifice have shaped how I read and write. This is for my father Sungjoon, a
brilliant scholar and friend, who inspires me to keep learning and fighting. This is for my sisters
Emily and Isabella, brave artists who inspire me to live creatively and courageously, with
passion, kindness, and integrity. This is for my grandparents who have supported me
unconditionally despite how far I have been from them. This is for those I could not name who
have held me in their hearts despite the distance between us.

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Table of Contents
Dedication....................................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................................iii
List of Figures.............................................................................................................................. viii
Abstract.......................................................................................................................................... ix
Introduction: Testimonial Emotions............................................................................................... 1
Returning to the 1990s................................................................................................................ 4
Testimonial Emotions............................................................................................................... 10
Emotion as Vexed Analytic ...................................................................................................... 13
Reading the Postcolonial in Women’s Literature and Women’s Film ..................................... 15
Vulnerable Reading, Reparative Reading................................................................................. 17
Chapter 1: Between the Written Woman and the Writing Woman .............................................. 22
Gong Ji-young’s Novels of Complaint ......................................................................................... 22
Gong Ji-young: An Icon of Women’s Huildam and 386 Generation Writers.......................... 23
Remembering Revolution through the Emotional Woman Writer in Mackerel....................... 29
The Unhappy Archives of Go Alone Like the Rhinoceros’ Horn ............................................ 35
Conclusion: The Woman Writer’s Opacity .............................................................................. 40
Chapter 2: The Judge in Her Heart ............................................................................................... 45
Girlhood’s Disaffected Gaze in Eun Hee-kyung’s Fiction........................................................... 45
Girlhood’s Disaffected Gaze as a Tactic from Below .............................................................. 52
The Judge in Her Heart............................................................................................................. 60
Sadness and Feminine Beings: Reading Affectability as a Gendered Predicament ................. 65
Disaffection and Emotion as Conduits of Queer Temporality.................................................. 69
Conclusion: Feeling Otherwise................................................................................................. 72
Chapter 3: Feeling Askew............................................................................................................. 74
Errantry in Jeong Jae-eun and Kim Bora’s Films......................................................................... 74
Wandering, Play, and Precarity in Take Care of My Cat (2001).............................................. 80
Reading Errant Girlhood in House of Hummingbird (2018) .................................................... 96
Conclusion: Errantry’s Emergent Politics of Willfulness and Friendship.............................. 105
Chapter 4: Returning to the 1990s.............................................................................................. 110
Women’s Writing, Feminism Reboot, and Autotheory.............................................................. 110
Situating the Global 1990s and South Korean Literary Criticism of the 1990s ..................... 111

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Practices of Women’s Writing................................................................................................ 120
Minor Transnational Resonances of 1990s Women’s Literature ........................................... 127
Returning to the Feminist Possibilities of Autotheory............................................................ 130
Conclusion: Rewriting Political Subjects, Reading Worlds................................................... 136
Coda ............................................................................................................................................ 139
Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 145

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List of Figures
Figure 1: Frenetic movements in Take Care of My Cat………………………………………….85
Figure 2: Protagonists laughing and in motion in Take Care of My Cat…………...……………86
Figure 3: Ohn-jo and Bi-ryu spoil the camera shot………………………………………………87
Figure 4: Transitions from Hye-ju’s apartment in Incheon to the industrial landscape……..…..90
Figure 5: Transitions from Hye-ju’s apartment in Incheon to the industrial landscape……..…..91
Figure 6: Transitions from Hye-ju’s apartment in Incheon to the industrial landscape…………91
Figure 7: Transitions from Hye-ju’s apartment in Incheon to the industrial landscape………....91
Figure 8: Ground-level shots of moving feet at the terminal…………………………………….93
Figure 9: Tae-hee and Ji-young gaze at each other across the glass in the visiting room…...…..95
Figure 10: Tae-hee and Ji-young gaze at each other across the glass in the visiting room…..….95
Figure 11: Eun-hee and her classmates in House of Hummingbird…...………….………….…100
Figure 12: Eun-hee and Ji-sook jump on a trampoline…………………………………………101
Figure 13: A closeup of frayed stockings………………………………………………………103
Figure 14: Cut to the entrance of the dance club……………………………….………………103
Figure 15: Eun-hee and Ji-sook dance at the club…………………………………...…………103

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Abstract
Testimonial Emotions: Witnessing and Feeling the 1990s in South Korean Women’s
Literature and Film argues that representations of feminine emotion rooted in everyday,
domestic life act as sites of feminist critique and truth-telling in a group of literary and visual
texts about the 1990s by South Korean women writers and filmmakers, an archive broadly
referred to in contemporary discourse as women’s literature (yŏsŏng munhak) and women’s film
(yŏsŏng yŏnghwa). Drawing from feminist theories that frame emotions as interpretations of
predicaments critical to politicization, the dissertation positions emotions as contact zones rather
than mere expressions of interiority in which girls and women branded as deviant feel and think
in opposition to male kinship, heteronormative love, the nuclear family, and neoliberal success
vital to South Korea’s postcolonial nation building. Departing from previous readings of
women’s and 1990s texts as preoccupied with private, apolitical life, Testimonial Emotions
contributes to a growing turn to the feminist 1990s in Korean studies, placing these texts in
conversation with South Korean feminist criticism and Anglophone feminist cultural studies of
emotion. The project contributes to recent studies in postcolonial affect and feminist emotions
that destabilize the canonical center of Western late capitalism in Anglo-American affect studies,
introducing a feminist archive that has yet to be translated into English and positioning South
Korean women’s literature and film as a vital locus of the interplay between gendered emotions
and possibilities of solidarity and redress.

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Introduction: Testimonial Emotions
A Lone Room (Oettan Bang, 1995), an iconic novel of South Korean women’s literature
by Shin Kyung-sook that follows a former factory worker turned novelist, begins and ends with
the same passage: “I have a hunch that these words are neither fiction nor fact, but something in
between. I wonder if I would be able to say it’s literature. I think about writing, ask, what is
writing to me?” (Shin 1995, 15) The narrator ponders her life’s memories hovering between fact
and fiction, navigating the uncertainty of what writing means to her. The novel begins and ends
with a question about writing, and not just any act of writing, but the act of writing tinged with
an autotheoretical impulse that interrogates the relationship between living, feeling, thinking, and
making: “… what is writing to me?” A Lone Room, a classic of South Korean women’s
literature, is a useful text to begin this dissertation, as it embodies the questions that shape this
project: What does it mean to create as a woman in a national temporality of postdemocratization that renders the relationship between femininity, craft, and politics fraught?
What does it mean to represent women and feminine emotions, and by doing so create new
modes of knowledge that imagine truths and realities otherwise to modern constraints of gender
and sexuality?
A Lone Room’s narrator shares the same family name “Shin” as Shin Kyung-sook herself.
The protagonist is described as a former factory worker who becomes a successful writer
overnight when her debut novel is published, which is very similar to author Shin Kyung-sook’s
own background. The novel’s reception was undeniably gendered and classed, generating
headlines such as “Fifteen-year-old Yŏgong Country Girl Lived with the Dream of Becoming a

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Writer”1 and “I am head over heels for a certain woman these days,” depicting Shin as a naïve,
girlish woman who suddenly entered men’s metropolitan world of letters. 2 Although the novel
became a bestseller upon its release, it was met with criticism by readers who pointed out that the
women factory workers were only invoked in the context of the narrator’s own suffering and
consolation, or that the narrator used writing as a means to claim superiority over a subaltern
laboring class. Indeed, A Lone Room grapples with the possibility and impossibility of ethical
representation, especially of working-class women, as the narrator often finds herself working
through guilt and nostalgia as she remembers fellow female factory workers who shaped her
relationship to writing.
The narrator Shin must navigate her newfound privileges as a famous author, while
haunted by memories of working in a factory and surviving in a small, rented room with her
siblings. Despite the explosive success of her first novel, the narrator feels like an outsider in the
publishing industry, as she avoids news reporters with irritation. Feelings of guilt pervade A Lone
Room alongside feelings of being an outsider in the literary industry. The narrator remembers
that as a teenager she met an older union organizer who wholeheartedly supported her dream of
leaving the factory to become a writer. The woman’s words come back to haunt the narrator:
“‘You need to be fearless now… No need to lose your spirit. Are you still writing?’... ‘When you
become a writer, write about us too’” (Shin 1995, 354-355). It becomes clear early in the novel
that the narrator did not write about her fellow factory workers, and that the omission of these
women from her fiction intensifies the precarity of her identity as a writer.
1 Tonga Ilbo, December 8, 1995. Yŏgong is a Korean acronym for “woman factory worker,” used to convey either
contempt or sympathy.
2 Han’gyŏre sinmun, November 23, 1995, 8.

3
In Byun Young-joo’s documentary film Habitual Sadness (Najŭn moksori 2, 1997),
which follows the everyday lives of former Korean “comfort women” or sex slaves of the
Japanese Imperial Army, Byun asks what it means to create in the face of political
disappointment, with attention to the sexual violence of Korea’s colonial and postcolonial
temporalities. Self-criticism – the intellectual or artist critically situating the limitations and
possibilities of the self in relation to creative practice – is channeled through black screens over
which Byun describes her own limitations as a filmmaker and ally to the former comfort women
or halmoni, expressing disappointment and shame that she was unable to make it back from a
work trip to see one of the halmoni before she passed away. By attending to moments of selfreflexive thinking and feeling about modes of production by the figure of the filmmaker in
Habitual Sadness, especially in relation to opaque figures such as former “comfort women,” the
film arrives at a continuous negotiation with the figure of the feminist intellectual who strives to
imagine new forms of care and intimacy through her creative practice, claiming neither despair
nor an emancipatory horizon.
A Lone Room and Habitual Sadness offer a window into the conundrum of women’s
literature (yŏsŏng munhak) and women’s film (yŏsŏng yŏnghwa) that comprise the archive of
this dissertation. Both works confront the limits and possibilities of gendered and classed
representation in the temporality of the 1990s, often framed in these texts as a temporality of
political depression and disappointment, in which the semi-autobiographical woman writer and
the documentary filmmaker must contend with postcolonial aftermaths following the Japanese
Occupation, rapid industrialization which led to South Korea’s postcolonial modernization, and
the anti-state, anticolonial democratization (minjung) movement of the 1980s.

4
If political disappointment may be characterized as a longing for fundamental change that
outlasts a historical moment when it might have been fulfilled (Sara Marcus 2023), the writers
and filmmakers examined in this dissertation work through the political disappointment of the
above aftermaths (which often resulted in ambivalent states of progress with their own problems,
such as the collapse of various infrastructures after industrialization in the 1990s, or the
privatization of the market under the new civilian democracy of the 1990s) while envisioning
literary and filmic vocabularies of political insurgence rooted in the feminized spheres of the
everyday and the domestic in such aftermaths. These vocabularies of insurgence privilege
feminine emotion as a vexed space of disrupting and desiring the overturning of
heteropatriarchal grammars such as the gendered division of labor resulting from militarized
modernity (Seungsook Moon 2005) and the marginalization of women from progressive,
revolutionary culture (So-jin Park 2020).
Returning to the 1990s
As the first decade of civilian democracy following the Park Chung-hee and Chun Doohwan military dictatorships, the 1990s in South Korea embodied what Jin-kyung Lee has called a
“multiple and overlapping post-ness” defined by the aftermath of the 1980s democratization
movement which protested the ethnonational authoritarian military dictatorship and its
cooperation with U.S. military occupation. As Namhee Lee notes in her book Memory
Construction and the Politics of Time in Neoliberal South Korea (2022) which substantially
elaborates on the significance of South Korea’s democratization and subsequent neoliberal order,
the 1990s is widely framed as a post-revolutionary decade that heralded an explosion of
“previously unvoiced identities and desires” that were repressed in the previous decade of the

5
1980s which has been widely characterized by a cultural fixation with ideology and politics.3
Lee has framed the 1990s as “a new era” that was in the midst of a vigorous break from the past
through discursive “paradigm shifts” such as the shift from minjung (people) to simin (citizen),
from the political to the cultural, and from the collective to the individual.4
The Kim Young-sam presidency (1993-1998), which framed the 1990s in South Korea as
a decade of social development and globalization, promoted the image of the South Korean state
as a provider of social welfare in an effort to establish a new order that departed from the
preceding military regimes.5 While the 1990s were heralded as a new decade of democracy,
defined by the peaceful transfer of government through direct presidential election in 1987 and
the establishment of parliamentary democracy, it was also a time of great political
disappointment during which many Korean artists and intellectuals were coming to terms with
the persistence of problems such as gendered and sexualized violence continuing from South
Korea’s rapid rise to modernity to the contemporary. The 1990s was a contradictory decade for
South Korean women because despite the establishment of democracy, women’s rights as
national citizens remained mediated by male family and kinship, an enduring legacy of military
rule (Moon 2005). The 1990s also heralded growing feminist movements in South Korea, as
issues of gendered violence became a focus of public debate including calls for the abolition of
the patriarchal family headship system and testimonies by former sex slaves of the Japanese
Imperial Army (Song 2015). Testimonial Emotions examines how the above contradictions
between state gender ideologies and feminist discourses are reflected in novels and films.
3 Namhee Lee, Memory Construction and the Politics of Time in Neoliberal South Korea, 4. 4 Ibid, 7.
5 Seungsook Moon, Militarized Modernity, 117.

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In contemporary progressive South Korean criticism, the 1990s are consistently being
returned to as a means of making sense of South Korea’s contemporary political and historical
landscapes. A recent cultural history of the 1990s, The Beginning of All Presents, the 1990s
(Modŭn hyŏnjaeŭi sijak, 1990nyŏndae, 2023) by sociologist and cultural critic Yun Yŏ-il, frames
the 1990s as a decade foundational to South Korea’s contemporary moment. Yun argues that the
1990s, in some sense, continue to this day in South Korea because the decade marked the time
after the ideological decline of Marxism and the proliferation of discourses of the “post” in the
wake of such decline.6 The beginning of civil democracy for South Korea coincided with the
collapse of socialist realisms, and the mid-1990s saw the solidification of South Korea as a
consumer society.7 During this time of transition marked by the collapse of previously accepted
ways of thinking about and doing politics, namely the ubiquitous influence of Marxism and the
privileging of the ethnonational male worker as the nation’s central political subject, cultural
production including cultural magazines such as Review which rose to prominence in the 1990s
turned to the desire for the “new” through arts and criticism.8 According to Yun, the decline of
realism as a popular aesthetics in the 1990s, concurrent with the decline of Marxism as a popular
ideology, gave way to the proliferation of aesthetic discourses such as interiority, everyday life,
embodiment, feminism, and sexuality.9
The Beginning of All Presents, the 1990s utilizes cultural magazines (munhwaji) to trace
the transformations of the 1990s in relation to South Korea’s present. The volume situates gender
and sexuality as the most divisive realm of politics in the 1990s as well as in contemporary South
Korea, citing feminist magazine If that debuted and closed in the 1990s. In If, women’s desires
6 Yun, Modŭn hyŏnjaeŭi sijak, 1990nyŏndae, 3 7 Ibid, 11.
8 Ibid, 13.
9 Ibid, 42.

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are emphasized, as well as the political nature of the personal. The following passage from the
magazine showcases how the editors of the magazine were experimenting with language in order
to express previously limited or taboo modes of feminine embodiment:
Let’s laugh! We have shed too many tears. But now we want to laugh… We want
to laugh like silence that explodes, like a fountain that bursts forth… Let’s laugh! Let’s
turn it inside out (dwijipja)! As women born into this world, we each hold a desire
(yokmang) that has grown naturally in our interior (naemyun). And we have realized that
we each hold the same desire, and we want to overturn the idea that this desire is
destructive. We want to turn this world inside out for once with excitement. Aren’t you
curious what will happen?10
This passage insists on overturning patriarchal epistemologies of women’s desires and
prioritizing explosion over repression. The editors of If fixate on the embodied truths of the
feminine interior that is a space for desire, which in turn possesses the power of overturning, or
“[turning] this world inside out for once with excitement.” The editors suggest that being attuned
to the interior, which houses transformative and even insurgent desires, could lead to the
speculation of another world, another emotion that alchemizes laughter and tears. The affective
dimensions of feminine experience in this passage – deeply rooted in the self’s “interior” –
allows for the theorization of new feminist possibilities. South Korean feminist collectives such
as If that were active in the 1990s emphasized what Sara Ahmed has called the “messiness of the
experiential” (2014, 2010), claiming interiority, emotion, and embodiment as sites of political
transformation.
10 Ibid, 234.

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It would not be an exaggeration to propose that the 1990s in South Korea can be read as a
temporality fixated with femininity during which femininity became a vexed analytic that
proliferated in critical and popular discourse. The early to mid-1990s in South Korea heralded a
time of intense consumerist aesthetics during which citizens fantasized about entering the middle
class; the rise of consumerism was feminized, and this rise coincided with the anxiety of the
feminization of society.11 Femininity was often associated with the commercial, which
negatively influenced the reception of women’s cultural production in dominant discourse.
Indeed, the conflation of the privatization of a newly democratic society with femininity reflects
the dominant political ethos of the previous decade of the 1980s which relegated femininity to
bourgeois false consciousness.12
My investment in the modifier “women’s” is intimately tied to the denigration of “the
aesthetics of femininity” (yŏsŏngsŏng ŭi mihak) that continues to this day. Even Yun’s most
recent cultural history of the 1990s published in 2023, which I have amply cited in this
introduction, suggests that South Korean women’s writing of the 1990s failed to reach genuine
“criticality” and “artistry” because of its repetition of the form of the “adultery novel” (pullyun
sosŏl). Like many of his predecessors, Yun, a leftist cultural critic sharing his work on the
currently trending topic of the 1990s through the progressive publisher Dolbaegae, replicates
dominant discursive paradigms such as the “adultery novel” (a paradigm that obliquely dismisses
representations of women’s sexuality and embodiment as not rigorous enough) that are at their
core mired in masculinist metrics of critical and artistic mastery. As Oh Hae-jin has noted, the
popularity of women writers in the 1990s prompted alarm from “uncle readers” who lamented
11 Ibid, 227. 12 See Kim Eun-ha’s article “386-sedae yŏsŏng huildam gwa chubyŏnin ŭrosŏ kŭlssŭgi” (2010) for more.

9
the feminization of national literature.13 Similarly, Lee Sang-kyung has discussed how despite
the popularity of women novelists of the late 1980s and 1990s, the artistic rigor of their works
were often discredited for dealing with so-called women’s issues (1999, 44).
In terms of cinema, the 1990s heralded a golden age of independent cinema by women
filmmakers, and films which reflected the social experiences of South Korean women were
critically and colloquially referred to as “women’s film” (yŏsŏng yŏnghwa). Soyoung Kim has
noted that the discourse of national identity – foundational to the student movement of the 1980s
– was challenged during the 1990s in South Korean cinema through phenomena such as the
proliferation of film festivals organized by feminist and queer activist groups. These film
festivals made possible the formation of “alternative public spheres” that could be tested “against
the civil society claimed by the present government and mainstream media.”14 Since the 1990s,
women’s film has been framed as “not only as a tool of cinematic representation of women’s
issues, but also as a critical discourse reinterpreting the female spectatorship marginalized in
South Korean film historiography” (Nohchool Park 2009, 138).
In addition to being associated with gendered genres of literature and film, namely
women’s literature and women’s film, the 1990s in South Korea continues to be associated with
specific structures of feeling (Raymond Williams 1977). The structures of feeling that dominated
1990s South Korea after democratization from decades of military dictatorships has been
referred to as “post-revolutionary affect” by Jesook Song, a public feeling of social mourning
reminiscent of the military era compounded with the imperative of enjoyment brought about by
post-democratization (2015, 15). Similarly, Heo Yoon articulates the popular sentiments of
13 See Oh Hae-jin’s article, “Korean Literature, ‘Analysis’ Over Worry” (2019):
http://m.ch.yes24.com/Article/View/39027 14 Kim, “Cine-Mania’ or Cinephilia: Film Festivals and the Identity Question,” 80.

10
“depression and loss after the revolution” which presented themselves in the literature and
“reading culture” of post-democratization (2018, 26). Suh Yeong-chae’s formulation of the
phrase “1990s feeling” in his critique of Shin Kyung-sook’s popular novel A Solitary Room
(Oettan Pang, 1995) referred to the prioritization of “private intimacy” over “public causes”
(2005, 242).
The above aesthetic and affective paradigms of gender and temporality have been
critiqued by South Korean feminist and queer scholars. The discursive feminization of interiority
(naemyŏngsŏng) as a personal, individual, and/or apolitical mode of engaging with the world by
dominant critics of the 1990s such as Paik Nak-chung and Hwang Jong-yeon has been critiqued
by contemporary South Korean feminist critics as a masculinist gesture that refused to see the
continuing legacies of political engagement by women, queer people, and the differently abled
that not only continues from the 1980s into the 1990s, but also crescendos in the 1990s (Heo
2018, 233). Indeed, the “affective historiography” (Choe 2015, 134) of South Korean women
filmmakers active in the 1990s who sought to transform official national masculinist histories
through the affective truth of women’s lived experience rooted in everyday, domestic spaces is a
testament to how the personal and the emotional which were intimately associated with
interiority was manipulated by women artists of the 1990s as a site of political transformation.
Testimonial Emotions is an exercise in complicating and gesturing beyond the existing structures
of feeling that are evoked in relation to the 1990s.
Testimonial Emotions
Testimonial Emotions asks: How do texts gendered feminine from the onset of their
reception strategically frame the relationship between textual representations of emotion and

11
feminist consciousness? How do we listen to what is often brushed away as female complaint or
sentimentality? How do reading and writing practices attentive to emotional registers latent in
everyday feminine life build emergent feminist commons? By fusing insights from literature,
film, feminist and queer theory, and affect studies, this interdisciplinary project deepens our
understanding of how entanglements of emotion, creative practice, and politics in women’s texts
create oppositional knowledges.
Testimonial Emotions argues that representations of emotion rooted in everyday,
domestic life act as sites of feminist critique and truth-telling in a group of literary and visual
texts about the 1990s by South Korean women writers and filmmakers, an archive broadly
referred to in contemporary discourse as women’s literature (yŏsŏng munhak) and women’s film
(yŏsŏng yŏnghwa). Through the central intervention of testimonial emotions, I position textual
representations of emotion as sites of disturbance that testify against regimes of gender
normativity inextricable from South Korea’s postcolonial nation building. Drawing from
feminist theories by scholars such as Sara Ahmed and Sianne Ngai that frame emotions as
interpretations of predicaments critical to politicization, I position emotions as contact zones
rather than mere expressions of interiority in which girls and women branded as deviant (the
disobedient housewife, the errant schoolgirl, the depressed divorcee) create truths oppositional to
male kinship, heteronormative love, the nuclear family, and neoliberal success.
If a disturbance can be interpreted as a feminist phenomenon of refusing to assemble
around conventional happiness (Ahmed 2010), each of the works that comprise this project’s
primary archive offer a disturbance of some sort. The repressed screams of depressed
housewives, the wandering movements of unemployed young women, and the piercing critiques
of girlhood’s gaze all converge in the disturbance of what a girl or a woman is supposed to be,

12
according to heteropatriarchal intimacies rooted in the nation, the family, and the home. What
would it mean to imagine otherwise, to go astray from the gendered grammars of militarized
modernity (Seungsook Moon 2005) which relegated women to reproducers and household
managers, as well as the neoliberal demands of self-management that center the heteronormative
nuclear family? How, then, do the emotions that arise from such disturbances generate feminist
critiques, truths, and more broadly, knowledges? I seek to address these questions through this
dissertation’s titular theorization that combines testimony and emotion.
“Testimonial emotions” open up lived and embodied archives, legitimizing lived
experience in the face of erasure and threat. Rather than employing conventional formulations of
testimony as a speech act with a reducible audience, this dissertation understands testimony in
proximity to what Proma Tagore calls an alternative historical and archival process (2009, 6). In
other words, emotions of lived experience in written narratives and visual media, despite their
fictional natures, are considered testimonial in this dissertation. Rather than limit specific
positive or negative emotions as testimonial, this dissertation considers a wide range of affective
expressions as possessing the critical potential of testimony. These modalities of witness, rooted
in the everyday and the ordinary, are sources of knowledge which locate latent effects of
heteropatriarchal violence and insurgence that evades the gendered grammar of masculinist
formulations of resistance in South Korea’s dominant cultural imaginary fixated on industrial
workplaces, universities, and the streets. The emotions that arise in my selected texts are not
state-sanctioned or formally acknowledged as means to measure wrongdoing; in fact, these
emotions often linger at the failure and ambivalence of transforming violent or oppressive
situations. Such failure and ambivalence, however, do not negate disturbance or even insurgence.
The failure to move on from a traumatic past of activism in Mackerel or the ambivalence one

13
feels towards one’s biological family in House of Hummingbird become the very sites where
female figures such as the former activist or the errant schoolgirl are moved not in service of, but
against a national progressive philosophy that scorns women’s emotionality as well as a national
culture that prizes the nuclear family as the most important locus of kinship. Testimonial
emotions engage the question of what it means to live a far from democratic life in a supposedly
democratic society.
Emotion as Vexed Analytic
Emotion is a vexed analytic that repeatedly surfaces in the discourses surrounding South
Korean women’s literature and women’s film, and thus requires repeated examination in feminist
analyses of this archive that remains heavily gendered and provokes contemporary feminist
scholars to return to its gendering. For instance, women’s film or yŏsŏng yŏnghwa in the 1990s
became a means to rename female audience-targeted films. The reappropriation of the term
yŏsŏng (over terms yŏja which is closer to the connotation of “female” and yŏryu which is closer
to the connotation of “lady”) to describe film marks a departure from the derogatory appellation
of female audience-targeted films as “weepies” in previous decades (Kim 1998). The conflation
of excessive emotion with female audiences in surrounding discourse, as well as the active
efforts of South Korean women filmmakers to create works that did not shy away from the
emotional, the embodied, and the feminine, makes for a case study of the contradictory politics
of reception and creative practice that was a recurring theme with regards to South Korean
women’s texts of the 1990s. I privilege emotion in my readings not only because emotion reveals
how the personal is political and in so doing recuperates excessive feminine feeling, but also
because emotion poses a means to think through the contemporary feminist desire refracted in

14
contemporary South Korean literature, film, and criticism to make sense of a national history still
reeling from the consequences of modernity through the feminine and the bodily other (B. Kim
2023, 13).
Contemporary South Korean feminist scholars are returning to so-called private
narratives by 1990s women writers such as confessional writing or coming-of-age narratives
because, according to a spring 2023 issue of the journal Feminism and Korean Literature, there
is a communal desire to “newly read the here and now” through such retrospectives of 1990s
women’s literature (J. Kim 2023, 3). While contemporary South Korea of the 2010s and 2020s
has been heralded as an age of “feminism reboot” due to the intense visibility of feminism
through movements such as the Korean #MeToo Movement and Cho Nam-ju’s bestselling
feminist novel Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, femicides continue to happen in public places such as
subway restrooms and universities as anti-feminism and men’s rights movements continue to
grow. In such a reality shaped by a feminist renaissance and perilous misogyny, South Korean
feminist scholars are turning to the 1990s and more specifically 1990s texts by women. To return
to the 1990s in the South Korean context is, in many ways, to do the work of feminist
retrospective by revisiting how texts are changed by the way we read them (Ellen Rooney
2006). While there have been book-length studies that center emotion in relation to South
Korean feminist cultural production such as Son Hui-chong’s essay collection Feminism Reboot:
Voices that Pierced through an Era of Hate (2017), there has yet to be a book-length exploration
of the politics of emotion in South Korean women’s literature and film with a focus on the
1990s. Testimonial Emotions seeks to contribute such an exploration which expands upon how
modes of reading textual representations of emotion may transform how we live our own lives as
feminist thinkers.

15
My approach to emotion in Testimonial Emotions takes inspiration from Sara Ahmed and
Sianne Ngai’s engagements with emotions as how we come into contact with objects and others
(Ahmed 2014, 208) and as interpretations of predicaments that conjoin problems in a distinct
manner (Ngai 2005, 3). Drawing from feminist and queer cultural studies of emotion, especially
the Public Feelings Project which frames emotional negativity as a possible resource for political
action (Cvetkovich 2012, 2), I approach emotion as an everyday phenomenon mired in the
“messiness of the experiential” (Ahmed 2014, 210) that illuminates life in its most mundane and
remarkable forms, a contact zone of the ordinary where flows of power take place (Stewart 2007,
3). In this dissertation, emotion is positioned as a site of signification that enables new systems of
meaning disruptive of heteropatriarchy’s conscription of ethnonational womanhood. Straying
from the centers of Western late capitalism that remain the privileged sites of inquiry in AngloAmerican affect studies, Testimonial Emotions turns to emotions of feminine life – deviant and
cliché – that interrogate what it means to be a girl or a woman in postcolonial and newly
democratic South Korea, a context shaped by transpacific flows of power including Japanese
empire and U.S. military occupation, leading to rapid modernization and anti-state, anticolonial
revolution. My intervention into emotion in South Korean women’s literature and film
contributes to not only Anglo-American feminist and queer cultural studies of emotion, but also
contemporary South Korean feminist criticism as well as postcolonial affect studies.
Reading the Postcolonial in Women’s Literature and Women’s Film
South Korea’s rapid industrialization, shift from aid-receiving to aid-giving country, and
contemporary soft power through Hallyu has cemented it as a decidedly non-Global South, semicolonial global entity. However, South Korea remains a location that is heavily shaped by
postcoloniality in the form of the gendered mass mobilization of its citizens. Women’s sex and

16
sexualized service labors were mobilized at the level of family and the domestic sphere through
“intersecting ideologies of familism and patriarchy” during South Korea’s modernization (J. Lee
2010, 26). To this day, men continue to be mass mobilized as soldiers, and women continue to be
pressured by the state to be mothers and domestic laborers in South Korea. The 1990s – the first
decade of democracy after decades of military dictatorships – was a decade in which conditions
of the postcolonial were rising to the surface in the form of structural collapse (a consequence of
rapid industrialization under the military dictatorships), as well as the greater visibility of issues
of gendered and sexualized violence that were to some degree repressed in the previous decade’s
fixation with class critique that often excluded non-masculine subjects.
South Korea’s postcolonial conditions of collapse and violence suffuse this dissertation’s
archive, concentrated in emotional sites of ordinary feminine life that decidedly evade the binary
of doom and emancipation, lingering at a space between that is shaped by emotional negativity
(unhappiness, depression, fear, disaffection, suspicion of love) and the emergent feminist
possibilities of such negativity. Gong Ji-young, Eun Hee-kyung, Kim Bora, and Jeong Jae-eun
ask what it means to live in an age that comes after the promise of revolution, and what it means
to be dissatisfied with the “men’s domination culture” (namsŏng chibae munhwa) harkening
from South Korea’s patriarchal military culture essential to postcolonial nation building, to quote
contributors to the fourth edition of the feminist journal Another Culture (Tto hanaŭi munhwa,
1995). With regards to temporality, this dissertation is dedicated to a continuity over a
periodization of rupture, as can be seen in the resonances between the 1980s and the 1990s, as
well as between the 1990s, the 2000s, the 2010s, and our contemporary moment of the 2020s.
In a recent special issue on postcolonial affect in ariel: A Review of International English
Literature, postcolonial affect has been situated as a means to explore “... a move away from

17
critical assessments of false consciousness and accusations of political complicity to more
exploratory forms of critique that open up the terrain of colonial desire and attachment and its
scenes of fantasy” (Khanna 2023, 243-244). In part aligned with such a critical spirit that does
not subscribe to the radical Marxist metrics of revolutionary versus false consciousness, a
metrics that has heavily shaped South Korea’s progressive culture, the literature and film in
Testimonial Emotions does not differentiate between “good” or “bad” politics, resistant or nonresistant impulses, or the absence or presence of agency. Many of the female subjects in my
archive already know they are, to some extent, trapped and even complicit heteropatriarchy and
capitalism. What I am interested in is how they negotiate such entrapment and through such
negotiations, generate possibilities of insurgence and feminist solidarity. I am inspired by what
Julietta Singh has described as “vital ambivalence,” or a postcolonial, feminist, and queer
practice of representation that emphasizes, politicizes, and embraces the subject’s contradictions
and slippages (2018, 158).
Vulnerable Reading, Reparative Reading
Testimonial Emotions participates in a vulnerable and reparative reading of a group of
literary and visual texts that have been heavily gendered feminine in their initial reception.
Instead of framing these texts as inherently feminine, or subscribing to the oft-accepted paradigm
shifts from political to cultural, collective to individual which dominated the periodization of
South Korea’s 1990s (Namhee Lee 2022), Testimonial Emotions stays with what is produced
when the emotional feminine rooted in the everyday and the domestic becomes a means of
witness and critique. Returning to South Korean women’s literature and film about the 1990s –
reading vulnerably, with attention to feeling injustice and refusing to engage with it through

18
forms of conquest, as Julietta Singh has written (2018, 21) – gives us a chance to conduct what
Eve Sedgwick has called reparative readings that attend to “the many ways selves and
communities succeed in extracting sustenance from… a culture whose avowed desire has often
been not to sustain them” (2002, 151). Returning to Mackerel, Go Alone Like the Rhinoceros
Horn, The Bird’s Gift, House of Hummingbird, and Take Care of My Cat asks us who or what
gets to be political, in the past as well as in the present. Testimonial Emotions recuperates
emotion as a feminist analytic in texts that are often placed in proximity to private feminine
interiority, troubling the gendered dichotomies of private and public and revolutionary and false
consciousness foundational to South Korean progressive critical traditions. The project positions
contemporary South Korean feminist texts as a vital locus of interrogating the relationship
between gendered emotions and possibilities of solidarity and redress.
Chapter One examines the figure of the emotional woman writer as an overlooked arbiter
of justice in novels Go Alone Like the Rhinoceros’ Horn (Musoŭi ppulch'ŏrŏm honjasŏ kara,
1993) and Mackerel (Kodŭngŏ, 1994) by Gong Ji-young, reading alongside and in tension with
the paradigm of sentimentality surrounding Gong’s popular reception. Thinking through how
complaint may reconstitute dominant modes of reading the gendered genre of women’s huildam
literature, this chapter ask how we may theorize the stakes of reading the traces of feminine life
in the post-revolutionary decade of the 1990s. In Gong’s novels, these stakes present themselves
in textual representations of depressive former activists, housewives, and artists complaining
together that creates new forms of sociality oppositional to the masculinist and nationalist
memories of the 1980s and 1990s.
Chapter Two discusses how Eun Hee-kyung’s The Bird’s Gift (Saeŭi sŏnmul, 1995), a
representative novel of 1990s literature, provincializes heteropatriarchal epistemologies of

19
womanhood under militarized modernity through girlhood’s disaffected gaze. The novel’s
narrativization of love and sadness, through girlhood’s disaffected gaze, demonstrates a rewriting
of national history through observations of romantic and familial intimacies. I read The Bird’s
Gift as an interruptive text that disrupts patriarchal Korean literary representations of girlhood
and critiques what becomes affectively sedimented, circulated, and repeated in everyday life
mutually constitutive of a postcolonial national culture reliant upon the mass mobilization of
gendered subjectivities.
Chapter Three traces visual representations of emotional and bodily wandering or
straying in Jeong Jae-eun’s film Take Care of My Cat (Koyangirŭl put'ak'ae, 2001) and in Kim
Bora’s film House of Hummingbird (Pŏlsae, 2018), positioning errantry as an emergent queer
feminist politics of straying from the ethnonation, blood relations, and economic possessions.
Drawing from queer and postcolonial methods of reading askew, this chapter argues that visual
representations of wandering and straying in Jeong Jae-eun and Kim Bora’s films generate
modes of being emotionally moved in proximity to feminist and queer critical sensibilities. I
examine errantry in these films as a feminist and queer practice and process of wandering and
straying from centers of normative social participation such as the school, the family, and the
workplace.
Chapter Four maps transcultural critiques of how to read the emotive and the feminine,
relating theoretical concepts such as écriture féminine and autotheory to the primary archive.
This chapter situates the global 1990s and articulates enmeshed critical vocabularies of women’s
writing spanning South Korean feminist criticism, Anglo-American women of color feminisms,
and French feminist psychoanalysis. By examining how acts of creating art are mutually
constitutive of acts of feeling and embodied experience, the chapter also expands upon the

20
feminist significance of the autotheoretical impulse present throughout South Korean women’s
literature and film.
I return to Shin Kyung-sook’s famous quote from A Lone Room to make sense of this
project’s larger ambition of connecting feminist criticality to the emotional, lived realities of
creative practice: “I have a hunch that these words are neither fiction nor fact, but something in
between. I wonder if I would be able to say it’s literature. I think about writing, ask, what is
writing to me?” (Shin 1995, 15) This passage reveals a liminal space, “something in between.”
The interrogation of the figure of the female creator becomes inseparable from the living of
personal history that rewrites the grand discourse of national history rendered legible through
modernity, revolution, and democracy. The woman novelist – a former factory worker, suddenly
successful and grappling with the shame and guilt of having moved on from her past, a
conundrum to herself – is forever outside of “literature.” In between fiction and fact, she thinks
about writing. Her question of “what is writing to me” evokes no answers or resolutions. A Lone
Room begins and ends with this liminal space of self-questioning that refuses to resolve itself.
Like the semi-autobiographical novelist Shin, the female protagonists in this
dissertation’s novels and films question what it means to create other realities or worlds in the
face of limitation, whether that limitation is being outsider in the literary establishment or being
physically constrained by labor and intimacy. These protagonists – struggling novelists, former
activists, depressed housewives, a woman who claims she did not need to grow up, errant
schoolgirls, and wandering unemployed women – are inseparable from the writers and
filmmakers who created them. Indeed, as chapter four elaborates, Gong Ji-young, Kim Bora, and
Jeong Jae-eun explicitly developed autotheoretical approaches to their own texts, reflecting on
creative practice through their own lived experiences. Eun Hee-kyung, Kim Bora, and Jeong Jae-

21
eun have prompted a strong autotheoretical response from everyday feminist readers. The
enmeshment between life and practice, represented emotions and emotions in the flesh, is at the
core of Testimonial Emotions.

22
Chapter 1: Between the Written Woman and the Writing Woman
Gong Ji-young’s Novels of Complaint
This chapter examines representations of women’s unhappiness in Gong Ji-young’s
novels Mackerel (Kodŭngŏ, 1994) and Go Alone Like the Rhinoceros’ Horn (Musoŭi
ppulch'ŏrŏm honjasŏ kara, 1993) with attention to how complaint in these novels reconstitute
tropes of South Korean huildam literature which can be translated as a “literature of
reminiscence” and which emerged in the 1990s as writers who had lived the 1980s
democratization (minjung) movement expressed melancholic loss, regret, and the failure of
revolutionary hope or vision (Lee 2022, 45). Principal features of huildam literature include
survivor’s guilt, nostalgia, disillusionment, remembering the “age of revolution,” the previous
decade of the 1980s largely defined in South Korea’s cultural imaginary by an anti-state,
anticolonial democratization movement that protested decades of military dictatorships. Huildam
literature traditionally centers the narrative of a male protagonist’s experiences in prison after
being active in the 1980s democratization movement which reflects the larger problem of
hegemonic masculinity endemic to the “386 generation,” referring broadly to a generation of
South Koreans who share the “historical experience” of democratization, or those who
experienced the democratization movement in their twenties during the 1980s and began their
thirties in the 1990s (So-jin Park 2020, 6).
The dominant paradigms that define huildam in contemporary criticism are intensely
affective, including sentimentality, viewing the present with despair while assuming that
resistance is impossible in the present decade, loss and futility, and a fixation with personal
and/or emotional authenticity (E. Kim 2010, 99). Recent readings of huildam by women writers
such as Gong Ji-young, Ch’oe Yun, and Kim In-suk – a loose critical grouping of texts if not a
gendered genre within a genre referred to as “women’s huildam” (yŏsŏng huildam) – has focused

23
on the marginalization of women in the male-dominated leftist oppositional culture of the “386
generation” that experienced the democratization movement in their twenties during the 1980s.
Male intellectuals continue to be the representative subjects of this generation, continuing their
careers from activism in the 1980s to progressive politics in South Korea’s contemporary civil
democracy (So-jin Park 2020, 20). Huildam by women has been situated as a gender-focused
genre within a generation-focused genre that recuperates women’s writing and voices within
progressive literature by showcasing depressive, emotional narratives that appeal to women’s
alienation from a progressive culture (E. Kim 2018, 333).
Huildam literature can be framed as a postcolonial, post-socialist genre that was a direct
cultural, political, and emotional product of intellectuals and artists making sense of the lingering
afterlives of resistance to South Korea’s postcolonial military state and reacting to their own
position within such afterlives of socialist resistance. Through my readings of Gong Ji-young’s
huildam novels, I read women’s huildam as a reconstitution of such a postcolonial genre in its
insistence on the traces of women’s subjectivities lost in national memories of postcolonial
revolution, with a focus on complaint as a feminist mode of critique. Such a reconstitution brings
to the fore themes of feminine “traces” and “silences” arising from the repression of the feminine
and more broadly gendered and sexualized difference in the dominant political ethos of the
democratization movement and the 386 generation.15
Gong Ji-young: An Icon of Women’s Huildam and 386 Generation Writers
Gong Ji-young is a prolific South Korean writer of fiction and nonfiction who has been
commercially successful since her debut in the late 1980s and is considered one of the
15 Eun-ha Kim, “386 sedae yŏsŏng huildamgwa chubyŏninŭrosŏ kŭlssŭgi,” 99.

24
representative writers of 1990s South Korean women’s literature (yŏsŏng munhak) as well as
huildam literature by women. Born in 1963 in Seoul, she graduated from the Department of
English at Yonsei University and is widely known for having been a student activist during her
college years like many of her contemporaries in the 386 Generation. Gong’s early work exhibits
a dedication to remembering the democratization movement through perspectives of student
activists, usually of middle-class “bourgeois” backgrounds who grapple with depression and
guilt regarding their role in activism as a consequence of their interactions with laborers. For
instance, her debut short story “Breaking Dawn” (Tongt’nŭn saebyŏk, 1988) follows a university
student who disguises herself as a laborer to enter a factory to radicalize the factory’s laborers, a
common practice of the student-led labor movements of the 1980s. Many works of Gong’s
published fiction were national bestsellers including novels Go Alone Like the Rhinoceros Horn
(Musoŭi ppulch'ŏrŏm honjasŏ kara, 1993), Mackerel (Kodŭngŏ, 1994) and the short story
collection Human Decency (Inggane daehan yeŭi, 2006) and she has been awarded prestigious
national literary awards such as the 2011 Yi Sang Literary Award.
Despite Gong Ji-young’s commercial success and popularity as a bestselling writer, in
South Korean literary criticism, she has been criticized for channeling through her writing a
“consciousness like cheap perfume” and for enacting “melodramatic sentimentality” (Kim 2010,
316). Gong is perhaps most well-known for her novel Go Alone Like the Rhinoceros’ Horn
(Musoŭi ppulch'ŏrŏm honjasŏ kara, henceforth Go Alone), a bestseller upon its publication in
1993 that galvanized debates about feminism alongside other popular feminist novels including I
Wish for What Is Forbidden to Me (Nanŭn somanghanda naege kŭmjidoen kŏsŭl, 1992) by Yang
Gui-ja. Go Alone contributed to a surge of novels, films, and plays by women artists in the
1990s, a renaissance of feminist culture that has been attributed to more women completing

25
university degrees and the dissolution of masculinist leftist grammars in the 1990s (Son 2017,
93).
In a recent interview on her writing career, Gong remembers how the release of Go Alone
was sensationalized, received as a shocking piece of literature that, Gong notes with some
sarcasm, male arts reporters hid from their wives and daughters.16 When asked why she decided
to write a book specifically about women’s struggles, Gong references a change in her own
political consciousness as a former activist, a writer, and a divorced woman. She recounts how
her background in activism had convinced her that she could interpret the entire world through
Marxism, but she soon realized the need for a different engagement with the lived consequences
of patriarchy after her failed marriage to a chauvinist leftist intellectual. Gong’s reflections on
the novel’s production mirror the changes from class-based politics of the 1980s to the intense
focus on gender in 1990s literature and politics. In addition, she decided to feature a divorced
woman as the protagonist of Go Alone precisely because the divorced woman was a taboo figure
during the early 1990s. Gong Ji-young as a writer announces a departure from privileged leftist
modes of critique such as Marxism, questioning what it means to be a woman after the end of
military rule and at the advent of democracy in 1990s South Korea.
Go Alone Like the Rhinoceros’ Horn and Mackerel are set in the early 1990s, the decade
after the South Korean government acceded to the people’s demands for a direct presidential
election in June of 1987 following the Park and Chun military dictatorships. Democratization
was achieved through a dissident movement that protested the ethnonational authoritarian
military dictatorship and its cooperation with U.S. military occupation, referred to as the
16 Chŏng Yŏ-nuk, “Kong jiyŏngi yŏsŏng dŭre ponaenŭn ŭngwŏn “sŭsŭro haengbokhaejil chunbihaeya,” KBS News,
August 15, 2021, https://news.kbs.co.kr/news/pc/view/view.do?ncd=5256559

26
democratization or minjung movement, consisting of a broad alliance of laborers, students,
intellectuals, religious activists, and oppositional politicians active throughout the 1980s.17 The
1990s marked a literary turn from the “grand discourse” (kŏdae tamnon) of Marxist narratives of
class critique and collective revolution to narratives of those who were excluded from such
discourse, including women and other socially minoritized groups (Jeong 2020, 9). Even after
democratization, marriage was often the only option for women who could not financially
support themselves, and women who sought to leave the family home with their children could
not enroll them in schools because of the father’s legal right to be informed of the child’s
location (Song 2014, 9). It was only until 2005 that the “family headship” (hojuje) system that
had forced women to rely on male lineage for property rights, parental rights, and inheritance
was abolished (Song 2014, 9), which means that effectively all the fictional women discussed in
this chapter could exercise basic legal rights mainly through their relationship with men.
A look into the fourth issue of the South Korean feminist magazine Another Culture (Tto
hana ŭi munhwa, 1995) debating “men’s domination culture” (namsŏng jibae munhwa) reveals
how the 1990s was a time of contentious reckoning regarding South Korean gender politics. The
pressure to work and survive under an increasingly neoliberal state adversely affected both men
and women, although women were doubly burdened with the expectation to perform unpaid
domestic and reproductive labor.18 The advent of democratic civil governance in South Korea
has been described as the symbolic killing of the authoritarian father (military dictators Chun
Doo-hwan and Park Chung-hee) by resistant sons who divided the spoils of power amongst
17 For more perspectives on the aesthetic and political legacy of the democratization movement, see Revisiting
Minjung edited by Sunyoung Park (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019). 18 Cho, Hyŏng. 1995. Tto hana ŭi munhwa no. 4: 34.

27
themselves.19 In the process of democratization dominated by men, women and especially
women laborers at the frontlines were excluded as impostors, and issues of sexual and domestic
violence were marginalized from the larger movement.20 As issues of gendered violence became
a focus of public debate and women writers and filmmakers rose in commercial visibility, the
1990s brought about feminist and queer movements that challenged the gendered discursive
grammar of the “square” (kwangjang, a male-centric formulation of organized resistance)
consisting of public/private, individual/society, political/apolitical.21
I propose a reading of Gong Ji-young’s bestselling novels Go Alone and Mackerel that
focuses on depressive feminine experiences, which I argue frame representations that could be
coded as melodramatic or sentimental as a vital site of feminist critique and truth-telling through
complaint. Departing from paranoid readings (Eve Sedgwick 2002) of Gong as a writer of
sentimentality, melodrama, and false consciousness, this chapter poses a reparative, vulnerable
reading of Gong Ji-young that recuperates transformative possibilities in the depressive
femininities that permeate these texts. Drawing from Julietta Singh’s formulation of vulnerable
reading as reading postcolonial subjectivities shaped by the intimate awareness of relations of
dependency, ambivalence, and feeling injustice (2018, 21), this chapter argues that Go Alone and
Mackerel can be read as novels of complaint which transform depressive sites of feminine
feeling – both isolated and shared by women in similar predicaments – into sites where feminist
consciousness becomes imminent if not heightened. This chapter examines how the complaints
of women writers and housewives in Gong’s novels posit ways of reading women’s huildam
literature that situate the very site of feminine sentiment as the place where the dominant
19 Heo, Yoon. “87-nyŏn ihu kwangjang ŭi chendŏ wa kyebo” [Gender and Genealogy in the Square after 1987].
Yŏsŏng munhak yŏn'gu, 2020.49, 234.
20 Ibid., 235.
21 Ibid., 236.

28
political philosophy of modern South Korean progressivism based on man/woman,
society/woman, consciousness/ignorance, reason/emotion, and mind/body begin to unravel (Kim
2010, 101).
The intensity of women’s emotions, an integral metrics for determining sentimentality in
not only Gong’s oeuvre but also the general reception of women’s literature as inherently
feminine writing that feels “too much” (Yoo 2008, 111), becomes the very grounds for staging
complaint that articulates injustice, harm, or wrong that has been marginalized or dismissed in
the main narratives of Go Alone and Mackerel. This chapter addresses the critical orientations
that can be salvaged from the refusal or inability to be happy expressed by historical subjects
ambivalent about political change and deeply mired in feelings of injustice. I turn to Sara
Ahmed’s feminist work on complaint that frames complaint as an insistence on the negative,
which becomes an oppositional stance against the happiness of self and others (2021, 1). Ahmed
reads complaint as a “killjoy genre” through which the complainer becomes the location of the
problem by contending with the violence that often fuels the happiness of dominant collective
cultures (2021, 1). Complaint can find its source of expression from “grief, pain, or
dissatisfaction,” “a cause of a protest or outcry, a bodily ailment, or a formal allegation” (Ahmed
2021, 4). While Ahmed writes about complaint in context of the institutional critique of
harassment and discrimination in Anglophone academic communities, I foreground complaints
as everyday occurrences in literature that illuminate the relationship between representations of
emotion and feminist consciousness.
The protagonists of Gong Ji-young’s novels – struggling writers, depressed housewives,
and former activists – often ruminate over their complaints in isolation, while occasionally their
complaints are communicated to other women including strangers, friends, or relatives. Even in

29
isolation, however, these complaints are intimately linked to what other women experience. It is
through complaint’s emergent movements towards the collective in Gong Ji-young’s novels that
we can reread the depressive feminine as a vital locus of feminist critique in 1990s women’s
literature and women’s huildam literature.
Remembering Revolution through the Emotional Woman Writer in Mackerel
Mackerel contributes to reading and writing cultures of 1990s South Korea defined by the
popular sentiment of “depression and loss after the revolution” following the 1980s
democratization movement by examining how such depression is gendered feminine (Heo 2019,
237). In the author’s note to A Most Beautiful Wandering (Tŏ isang arŭmdaun panghwangŭn
ŏpta, 1989), published several years before Mackerel, Gong Ji-young expresses how the 1980s
are essential to her own understanding of what it means to be a writer: “The fact that I spent my
twenties in the 1980s is by chance. But the fact that I wrote a novel about the 1980s is not by
chance…” (Gong 2011, 374-375). Gong suggests that writing about the 1980s is central to her
own practice as a writer, that the crises and memories of the historical moment hold critical value
in understanding the practice of writing itself. Being a writer for Gong means to be an artist who
is not afraid to rework the limits of retrospective. Writing becomes inseparable from the
dynamics of witness arising from lived experience. It is no coincidence that many of Gong’s
protagonists are artists themselves, viscerally conscious of their unstable yet vital positions
amidst currents of social and political transformation.
Mackerel follows the lives of Eun-rim and Myung-woo, former student activists haunted
by their memories of times past as they eke out a living in 1990s Seoul. Eun-rim and Myungwoo once shared a brief tryst that resulted in the dissolution of both of their marriages. Myung-

30
woo is a successful ghost writer who feels ashamed that he is now part of the bourgeois class,
and disappointed that he did not become the novelist he aspired to be. Eun-rim has just moved to
Seoul when the novel begins. Eun-rim possesses no acceptable credentials for the neoliberal
market, excluded from steady employment without a college degree. She is a destitute single
woman who is neither a housewife nor a career woman, a former member of the anti-state
anticolonial democratization movement in which she was scorned for not possessing as
revolutionary of a consciousness as her male counterparts. Although she manages to rent a room
in Seoul and work at a local store, Eun-rim succumbs to tuberculosis, malnutrition, and
alcoholism by the end of the novel, dying in a hospital with Myung-woo by her side.
Mackerel’s reception has situated its place in huildam literature, emphasizing its
incorporation of so-called private spaces saturated with depression and shame in contrast to
public spaces of activism often dominated by men as well as survivor’s guilt, nostalgia and
disillusionment, and remembering the “age of revolution” (E. Kim 2010, 101). The novel’s
protagonist Eun-rim finds herself excluded from the political collective she has participated in,
and her depressive tendencies can be traced to collective frustration and despair amongst activist
intellectuals of the democratization, what Namhee Lee has described as a “crisis of historical
subjectivity” (2007, 4), as well as the bleak realities of everyday survival for what Jesook Song
terms “subpopulations” (Song 2014, 4) of post-democratization South Korea, such as single
unmarried women.
This chapter’s reading of Mackerel builds from previous feminist readings of the
protagonist Eun-rim as a figure that recovers an ethos or energy of revolution rather than simply
being an object of absence or subjugation (Kim 2018, 321). Kim Eun-ha, for instance, reads the
emotionality of the female former activist in Mackerel as a utopic, revolutionary energy rather

31
than a disqualification of revolutionary potential (323). My reading of Mackerel is indebted to
Kim Eun-ha’s prior analysis which highlights gendered emotion as a critical approach to the text.
However, I would not characterize representations conventionally relegated to the private in
South Korean post-democratization culture – representations of the domestic and the emotional –
as separate from the public of activism. I would instead propose that the porousness between
memories of activism and the protagonist’s emotional life in the novel informs a larger historical
rewriting of how the political is remembered and written. While my reading of Mackerel does
not elevate Eun-rim as a vessel of revolutionary energy, it explores the possibility of Eun-rim’s
depressive emotionality as disruptive of who or what constitutes the political and the
revolutionary. I argue that Eun-rim’s emotional self-writing through the form of the diary entry
generates a politics of writing complaint that resists disappearance by refusing to abandon
memories of revolution and by recording practices of everyday survival despite precarity. These
diary entries confront the reader before each chapter as epigraphs rather than being integrated
into the main body of the text, suggesting how the personal may ambivalently and at times
piercingly reflect the historical traumas of the past and the present, while imagining the
possibility of a future divorced from capitalist mandates of survival.
Eun-rim’s capacity to be moved becomes a key site of political contention in Mackerel as
she struggles with fellow activists’ judgments of her as excessively emotional and irrational, thus
unfit for revolution. For instance, Eun-rim recounts an interaction that took place during her
college days in the mid to late 1980s during which an older male student in her department
berated her for her supposed “romantic” literary inclination of reading a novel by Herman Hesse.
She snapped back, “I haven’t finished it yet so I don’t know whether it’s romantic or not, if it
turns out to be romantic when I’m done reading, I’ll trash it” (Gong 1994, 135). Eun-rim is

32
dismissed as an incompetent participant in the democratization movement because she does not
champion rationality as foundational to progress. Feminist cultural studies of emotion have
taught us that those who speak out against established truths run the danger of being construed as
emotional, or “failing the very standards of reason and impartiality that are assumed to form the
basis of ‘good judgment’” (Ahmed 2014, 170), standards that are heavily gendered. Indeed, the
authoritarianism of the older male student towards Eun-rim, a younger female student in the
movement, mirrors the exclusion of female subjectivities in the dominant ethos of the male
intellectual-led democratization movement, as Hye-ryoung Lee (2018) and Namhee Lee (2007)
have discussed. A pervasive sense of being left out, or even scorned, by one’s compatriots
remains present throughout Mackerel, indicating classic sensibilities of women’s huildam
literature.
Myung-woo, Eun-rim’s former compatriot and lover, self-identifies as a progressive man
who forsakes his revolutionary ideals for a stable job in the big city. Despite his self-proclaimed
progressive politics, Myung-woo is quick to judge all women as excessively emotional. He
muses, “Women were such emotional animals. No matter how progressively he tried to think, it
was so” (Gong 1994, 27). His dismissal of all women as “emotional animals” alongside his
desire to think “progressively” characterizes a masculinity that self-identifies as progressive due
to its self-perceived non-emotionality. And yet, Eun-rim moves Myung-woo, as she is
worshipped by her former compatriot as a rapturous vessel of revolution: “The light of her eyes
that looked up at him was beautiful. That’s why in the past those close to her would call her this:
‘The eyes of Russia.’ …… homeland of revolution…… laborers who built railroads in the
snowy, icy field…… those eyes above the vast, white field of snow…… ” (Gong 1994, 47).
Although her days as an activist have long been over, Eun-rim remains a nostalgic object of

33
revolution from Myung-woo’s perspective, heavily influenced by the democratization
movement’s Marxist tendencies. Eun-rim’s physical and emotional body becomes a means for
Myung-woo to relive his activism days. Passages such as this one can be juxtaposed with Eunrim’s diary entries, which reveal the messy experiential traces of a woman writer who cannot be
reduced to an icon of past revolutionary passions.
Eun-rim’s diary entries offer a glimpse into Eun-rim’s emotional life world which is
directly juxtaposed with her glorified portrayals in the main text of the novel filtered through her
male compatriots’ perspective. Her writing disrupts the “silver light like rapture” (Gong 1994,
62) projected upon her by Myung-woo, leaving in its wake fragmented reckonings with everyday
domestic experiences of surviving poverty, unemployment, and displacement. For instance, an
entry from November 1993 attests to the difficulties Eun-rim faces as she navigates her new life
in Seoul: “I managed to claim two or three pyeong of land in one corner of Seoul and stay alive. I
made dinner and ate it, cleaned my room, and wrote my resume with care… I’m a woman, I have
no credentials, and although I received a suspended sentence, I have a criminal record…. It’s a
silent night. This low and gloomy peace right before the tears burst” (Gong 1994, 219). Eun-rim
is part of what Jesook Song calls the “subpopulations” of 1990s South Korea, people who did not
belong to “normative adult life” including queer people and divorced women (2014, 2) and who
made up the new poor of 1990s South Korea (2014, 6). The gloom that pervades her diary
counters Myung-woo’s reduction of Eun-rim as a figure to be worshipped and sensualized. The
diary entries’ depressive self-reflections displace the rapture and scorn imposed upon Eun-rim,
positing complaints about how she is perceived by the patriarchal collectives that dictate the
degress of her progressivism and her livelihood.

34
Eun-rim’s diary entries shuttle back and forth between the 1980s and 1990s, suffused
with a critical desire to witness all that has happened and is happening. An undated entry “stuck
between the pages” of her diary reads: “In the deep night and radiant day, like a dragon that
never closes that one eye out of the thousand eyes on its body, that one last eye, bloodshot, must
always watch the sleepless and most tormented one.” (Gong 1994, 283). This entry discloses a
desire to witness, and to be witnessed in turn. The “one last eye, bloodshot” must forever stay
open to suffering. The desire to be awake to suffering by witnessing it is present throughout the
novel, a small resistance in the face of the sense of depression and loss that pervades Eun-rim’s
life as she struggles to survive in Seoul. An entry dated September 1991 reads: “After I did some
exercises alone in the room, I wrote this and pasted it to the wall: I want to be clearly awake even
in the most painful moment. If this is my life… I will always be standing in the very middle of
it” (Gong 1994, 111). Writing becomes a process of witness and survival – reinforcing the reality
of one’s suffering, desires, and memories – amidst the violence of neglect, and writing becomes
inextricable from feeling pain, testifying to pain’s presence. The necessity to see suffering, to
never take one’s eye off it, is a motif that haunts not only Mackerel, but also the entirety of
Gong’s oeuvre.
Through the fragmented writing of the former activist, Mackerel renders legible the
discontinuities in the progressive female subject whose politics are questioned and who in turn
questions the dominant political ethos of progressivism through her complaints, thus
demonstrating how women’s huildam literature may situate complaint through representations of
depressive femininity. The novel’s framing of depressive femininity as a vital site of complaint,
channeled through literary forms such as the diary entry, illuminates practices of memory and
witness that center the othered consciousness of those who are not “male, high-skilled,

35
ethnonational/ist workers” politically representative of the South Korean ethnonation (J. Lee
2019, 281). By examining one woman’s depression and pain in direct response to the inability
and unwillingness to assimilate into revolutionary and neoliberal patriarchy, Mackerel produces
an informal record of complaint that is as private as it is public, as invested in political hope as it
is in political despair.
The Unhappy Archives of Go Alone Like the Rhinoceros’ Horn
Go Alone Like the Rhinoceros’ Horn (Musoŭi ppulch'ŏrŏm honjasŏ kara, 1993,
henceforth Go Alone) by Gong Ji-young is a novel that charts the lives of three South Korean
women who navigate oppressive domestic and marital situations.22 Go Alone follows Hye-wan,
Young-sun, and Kyung-hye, filtered through the third person perspective of Hye-wan, a novelist
in her thirties. Young-sun and Kyung-hye, on the other hand, are housewives who gave up their
careers. All three women are college-educated and part of the middle class, members of the “386
generation,” referring to the generation that experienced the 1980s democratization movement in
their twenties. Throughout the novel, these women consistently grapple with the dissonance
produced as their progressive feminist-coded politics, indicated through their memories of
participating in the women’s liberation movement in college, are consistently at odds with their
oppressive intimate lives. Young-sun uses alcohol to numb depression caused by her
confinement to the home and her distant husband, Kyung-hye struggles with an unfaithful
husband, and Hye-wan struggles with the stigma of divorce. These women, solidly middle class
with left-leaning pasts, are represented as disillusioned and depressive, no longer able to imagine
the social and political transformations they were once invested in.
22 All English translations of the novel are my own.

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Emotionality in Go Alone – especially women’s expressions of unhappiness – is framed
as a condition to be ashamed of, or a condition that signals feminine deviance. Such a dismissive
attitude towards women’s emotions can be traced to the lingering masculinist echoes of the
progressive culture of the 386 generation which relied on a dominant political philosophy based
on binaries of man/woman, consciousness/ignorance, and reason/emotion (Kim 2010, 101). In
the broader progressive culture of the 1980s, which shapes all the protagonists in Go Alone
regardless of gender, feminine expressions of emotion were widely considered bourgeois and
dulled of political valence (Kim 2010, 2018). These gendered binaries remain latent in Go Alone
through the accusations against women made by self-proclaimed progressive men. For example,
Young-sun’s husband Director Park, an activist turned independent filmmaker, dismisses Youngsun as a “lump of hysteria” (Gong 1993, 25). Hye-wan’s lover, a writer who purports to
psychologically understand all women, diagnoses Hye-wan’s constant suspicion of violence as a
sign of deplorable “crookedness” (Gong 1993, 160).
Go Alone begins with Young-sun’s suicide attempt and Hye-wan and Kyung-hye’s
collective reckoning with their friend’s dire condition. Hye-wan remembers a gathering of
married women during which Young-sun said: “‘No matter how smart you are, no matter how
good you were at studying, even if you had all the wisdom in the world, fate is stronger than all
of these! There’s nothing as scary as fate’” (Gong 1993, 15). Hye-wan recalls interpreting
Young-sun’s words as: “I want to talk with those who know what unhappiness is, what
humiliation is, those who have felt how incomprehensible life is, how full of suffering it is!
These people will be able to listen to me” (16). Hye-wan’s memory ultimately lingers at the site
of failure: failure of connection, failure of fellow feeling, failure of affirmation. This failure,

37
however, does not obscure Young-sun’s desire for a common language between women, and
more broadly a desire for solidarity between women who have experienced similar predicaments.
Hye-wan’s silent moments of relating to female strangers also indicate the novel’s
consistent evocation of emergent “complaint collectives” or a collection of stories and
experiences defined by shared feelings of complaint (Ahmed 2021, 278). For instance, Hyewan’s witnessing of a badly bruised woman at the bar triggers her own complaints regarding her
traumatic marriage: “Hye-wan knew. The special movements of a battered woman. It seemed,
because of the unshed tears, humidity was trapped in the woman’s body. So it seemed as if the
tears would burst out from her body like wringing out wet laundry if she even moved in the
slightest…” (Gong 1993, 160). Hye-wan creates her own way of knowing the “special
movements of a battered woman” which fixates on the humidity of unshed tears trapped within
the woman’s body. The tears threaten to “burst” “like wringing out wet laundry” if the woman
moves “in the slightest,” suggesting that the entrapment of these unshed tears embody a state of
non-catharsis perpetually threatening catharsis. Hye-wan bases her assumptions on her own
experiences of being beaten and raped by her ex-husband which she keeps secret. This embodied
knowledge becomes trapped in Hye-wan as well, as reflexive and explosive as the battered
woman’s unshed tears.
Despite the lack of resolution, catharsis, or sympathy, the women of Go Alone
consistently express the urgency of their unhappiness, generating a means of critique through the
very complaints that are dismissed as hysterical, excessive, and unreal in families and intimate
partnerships represented in the novel. Declarations such as “My sadness was most definitely not
a lie” (Gong 1993, 115), ruminated upon in quiet isolation, perform a complaint of the
surrounding culture that discredits the protagonists’ sadness in the first place. Being moved

38
makes possible the act of viewing oneself in proximity to others in similar predicaments, as we
see in Hye-wan’s connections to female strangers, imagined intimacies that are separate from
reproductive or heteronormative functions. By failing and in many cases refusing to detach
herself from her emotions, Hye-wan demonstrates how unhappiness may provide ground for
feminist critique and potential solidarity. Hye-wan’s “crooked” tendencies, to return to her
lover’s accusation, gesture towards a desire for collective complaint. The inability to extricate
oneself from a gendered collective, and the propensity to feel for and alongside them, places an
emphasis on an alternative public that is emergent in the novel.
In both Go Alone and Mackerel, the silenced scream surfaces alongside unshed tears in
the emotive experiences of the female protagonists, as evoked in Go Alone through Hye-wan’s
question, “What stopped the mouths of these women so they could not even scream in the face of
violence?” (Gong 1993, 38) The scream connotes an inability to reach catharsis as well as
unruliness beneath the experience of violence. Later in the same passage, Hye-wan imagines the
scream as a language, whose powers of communication can be activated only when understood
or tended to by another speaker of the language. This imagination indicates a desire for a
community that has not yet come into being in which understanding someone else’s scream
would be a form of connection, care, or communication. While the scream fails to create a
community, it does create a narrative public based on shared complaint or a kind of commons
based on shared woundedness (José Muñoz 2020).
Go Alone ends with Young-sun’s suicide and at the funeral, Hye-wan glimpses the same
Buddhist sutra Young-sun read her years ago: “Go alone like the rhinoceros’ horn” (Gong 1993,
293). Despite the implicit desire for community and solidarity that saturates the novel, the novel
ends with the directive to “go alone.” Through this depressive ending that does not pose any

39
possibilities of resolution or emancipation, Gong Ji-young gestures towards the tenacity of the
gendered violence which has become a latent, taken-for-granted aspect of modern intimacies that
continue in South Korea’s age of democracy. Through fictional representations of leftist South
Korean men behaving violently, Gong joins women writers of huildam literature by insisting on
the insidiousness of the “good wife, wise mother” ideal, a colonial remnant of South Korea’s
nation formation influenced by Japanese and American occupation. This ideal propagates notions
of womanhood useful to the fortification of empire and state, or that women be virtuous wives
who manage the household and wise mothers who produce and rear children for the next
generation. According to Elaine Kim, the good wife, wise mother ideal was “first promulgated in
Japan in the first decade of the 20th century as a way to interpolate women into the service of the
state during a period of intense industrialization, foreign expansionism, and militarism” (1997,
80-81). The good wife, wise mother ideal was adopted by the Japanese colonial government and
the ensuing native Korean political leadership as well and has continued to influence
contemporary expectations of gender and sexuality in South Korea (E. Kim 1997, 80-81).
In Go Alone, Young-sun can be read as an emotional body that initiates a radical
complaint through her attempt to take her own life, calling attention to her friends’ similar
predicaments that have been suffered in silence. Young-sun complains about her husband, an
independent film director, derisively referred to by her friends as “Director Park”: “‘I need to die
so he can no longer be the nice man… Do I still need to go to the psych ward after all I have told
you?’” (Gong 1993, 177) Young-sun alludes to the reason she attempted suicide: to not only end
her own suffering, but also to take her revenge on Director Park. Murderous, vengeful rage lurks
beneath Young-sun’s unhappiness, and she becomes fixated on her desire to hurt Director Park
back. Young-sun’s desire to hurt her husband back is intergenerational, as Young-sun’s mother

40
chokes her husband after he is debilitated by illness, mirroring the physical abuse she suffered at
his hands when he was younger and stronger. The desire to quite literally overcome or destroy
what once did violence unto oneself permeates women’s depressive expressions of unhappiness
in Go Alone. An instinctual need to enact one’s own justice – since nobody else cares to do so –
inflects the complaints, silenced screams, and unshed tears that surface in the novel, positioning
seemingly complacent, listless, depressed figures such as Hye-wan as overlooked arbiters of
justice.
By concentrating its site of political questioning in the ambivalence between complying
to and feeling wronged by demands of female relationality and comportment, Go Alone
engenders a feminist reading position that foregrounds “women’s disappointment in the tenuous
relation of romantic fantasy to lived intimacy” (Berlant 2008, 2). In the scrutinized agential
potential of the unpaid domestic worker, and in the scorned emotional excess of the failed
novelist, lies a lexicon of feeling that is suspicious of and jaded by politically salient indicators
of progress such as women’s liberation or post-authoritarian democracy. This lexicon of
women’s lived experiences, inextricable from the domestic, the marital, and the bodily,
catalogues complaint mired in failure and ambivalence as its own legitimate text.
Conclusion: The Woman Writer’s Opacity
This chapter has demonstrated how representations of the depressive feminine in
Mackerel and Go Alone foreground complaint, reading against the grain of Gong Ji-young’s
reception as a writer of sentimentality as well as the broader reception of 1990s women’s
literature. This chapter has argued that complaint in these novels expands upon the traditional
emotional tropes of shame and depression in women’s huildam literature by locating private

41
spaces of depression, grief, pain, and shame as the very sites of critiquing state and revolutionary
grammars of womanhood. Gong Ji-young frames the woman writer as the main interlocutor of
justice in both novels. An opaque figure, the woman writer is at turns scorned and adored, a
“shuttling figure in power’s household,” a figure that unravels “clear historical patterns at its
fictional border” (Kamuf 1988, 148-152). The woman writer in both novels is not interested in
assimilation, but rather dedicated to interrogating fragmentation, or “a way of living with
differences without turning them into opposites” which “always points to one’s limits” (Trinh
1990, 71-72). Trinh T. Minh-ha writes that “The to-and-fro movement between the written
woman and the writing woman is an endless one” (1989, 28). If, according to Trinh, “Charged
with intentionality, writing is therefore disclosing (a secret), and reading is believing” (1989, 28),
then it could be generative to read Gong Ji-young’s novels as disclosing a secret, inviting readers
that would believe what she has disclosed.
What, then, is the secret? What can be salvaged from the endless to-and-fro movement
between the written and the writing figure of woman? Gong Ji-young’s fiction offers a response
to these questions in the form of two writing women: Hye-wan in Go Alone, a novelist struggling
to write, occupying the strenuous space between expression and silence, catharsis and noncatharsis, and Eun-rim in Mackerel, a part-time laborer who writes in her diary as a means of
reckoning with her own precarity of being excluded from a past revolutionary collective as well
as from a livable life in the present of post-democratization. What seems to be disclosed through
these writing figures is an awareness of wrongdoing and ambivalence about the possibility of
justice. This ambivalence reflects the gendered sensibilities of the 1990s in South Korea, during
which women writers were issuing more complaints than ever before through their writing, and
during which legal forms of justice for women were just emerging.

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Gong Ji-young’s deliberate obscuration of her protagonists’ political salience gestures
towards a deliberate alteration of the political binaries of the “grand discourse” of South Korea’s
progressive cultures reliant on gendered binaries, but also progressive conceptualizations of art’s
function. The emotional orientations concentrated in literary figures excluded from activism and
dominant masculinist understandings of political action or resistance do much more than affirm a
gendered genre as a cloister of the feminine, the sticky feeling of the weeping or raging woman,
stuck in the stagnant complaints of the backwards, dependent, unable-to-liberate-oneself. Novels
such as Go Alone and Mackerel reconceptualize women’s writing as a practice that is irrevocably
touched by the very limitations of “woman” that have been produced by a masculinist
progressive political imaginary. In this chapter, I have shown how writing and written women
constantly brush up against the damning consequences of having to fulfill what a woman means
in order to ensure basic survival, while also playing with the critical possibilities of complaint.
The complaints issued forth by these women refuse transparency in the form of explicit political
action. Sara Ahmed writes “Making a complaint can change your sense of self, what you can do,
who you can be” (2021, 19). Go Alone and Mackerel demand an understanding of difference that
places its political investment in an unwillingness to settle in a singular definition of a woman
writer, a mother, a wife, and a single woman in post-democratization South Korea, positioning
the reader as an audience to the emotions that arise from this unwillingness.
Gong Ji-young incorporates a line from the poem “Tristesse” (“Sadness”) by romanticist
French writer Alfred de Musset at the beginning of Go Alone into a scene of Hye-wan’s selfintrospection as she contemplates her own and Young-sun’s injuries sustained from their
romantic relationships with men. The line originally reads: “Le seul bien qui me reste au
monde/Est d’avoir quelquefois pleuré,” or “The only good I still have left in this world/Is to have

43
cried sometime.” In the Korean translation used in Go Alone, the line reads: “The only truth I
have left in this world is that I cried sometime” (Gong 1993, 17). Go Alone begins with the
embodied wounds of a woman paired with the implied emotional injuries of another woman
evoked through the incorporation of a poem explicitly about sadness. “Tristesse” is a product of
the European movement of Romanticism, an artistic movement that emphasized the emotional,
the subjective, and the personal over the rationality and order that was a residue of the
Enlightenment. While Gong Ji-young is not explicitly writing against the Enlightenment
tradition, she is speaking back to a tradition of progressive culture that champions masculine
rationality. Eun-rim’s diary fragments show how despite the pain and loneliness that pervade
Eun-rim’s life in the 1990s, she uses writing to imagine community. An entry from August 1992
reads, “I shouldn’t just give up in my loneliness and at least sound a distant melody to those who
are more in need. So these thoughts make me stand up in my loneliness without hesitation”
(Gong 1994, 169-170). Gong suggests through Mackerel that loneliness becomes a place from
which to respond to “those who are more in need,” situating the depressive feminine as a means
to reimagine the collective.
Writing from the depressive structures of feeling of post-democratization and a middleclass intellectual background, Gong Ji-young offers a deliberately feminine exploration of
unhappiness in Go Alone Like the Rhinoceros’ Horn (1993) and Mackerel (1994) that reimagines
not only the meaning of woman but also the meaning of woman writer. Gong does not shy away
from themes of love and marriage coded as cliché in South Korean literary criticism, themes that
have been associated with biological womanhood in the reception of 1990s women’s literature.
Gong’s focus on conventional feminine sites of feeling generate critiques of how structural
antagonisms are “refracted in the intimate anxieties of emplotted love” (Berlant 2008, 13). Gong

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Ji-young’s fictional records of depressive women refuse to shy away from the feeling female, the
weeping, screaming, scorned woman, whose emotional expressions, her so-called excess,
becomes a necessary catalyst for transforming how the political is thought about. Go Alone Like
the Rhinoceros’ Horn (1993) and Mackerel (1994) contribute an understanding of women’s
literature – through both the writing woman and the written woman – that rewrites “the well of
interiority” (Shim 2015, 230) as complaint.

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Chapter 2: The Judge in Her Heart
Girlhood’s Disaffected Gaze in Eun Hee-kyung’s Fiction
The Bird’s Gift (Saeŭi sŏnmul, 1995) is an icon of 1990s South Korean literature. It has
been a steady seller since its release in 1995, and just recently in June 2022, a special edition
commemorating the one hundredth printing of the novel was released. The promotional cover
slip of the special edition declares, “Meet once more the girl we went wild over all those years
ago,” framing The Bird’s Gift as “a new classic among coming-of-age novels.” In The Bird’s
Gift, the narrator and protagonist Jin-hee claims to have not grown up since she was twelve years
old, bridging her first-person narrations of her girlhood in an unnamed small town during the
1960s and her present reality of living out her thirties during the 1990s in what is implied to be a
city such as Seoul. The Bird’s Gift centers retrospectives of girlhood through consistent
evocations of the space of the neighborhood and the everyday lives of its inhabitants, ranging
from an aunt’s romance with a soldier to a vendetta against a classmate. Although the present
moment of the novel is set in the 1990s, the 1990s act as a temporal frame to the novel, only
surfacing at the beginning and end through the same scene in a restaurant, where Jin-hee
contemplates the passage of time from the 1960s to the 1990s over dinner with one of her several
male lovers. The Bird’s Gift is a repository of colonial traces, as the textures of everyday life
which serve as the very material of human drama in the novel are suffused with the mundane,
taken-for-granted effects of empire, war, and militarization crucial to South Korea’s
modernization.
Through the figure of the rat, a figure that connects the 1960s to the 1990s by recurring in
ordinary spaces bridging temporalities, the novel suggests the continuities between eras of South
Korea’s modernization and democratization, with an emphasis on minoritized subjectivities such
as the girl, the madwoman, and the housewife. Female depression and madness are specters

46
throughout the novel, as it is implied that Jin-hee’s depressive mother died by suicide, and Jinhee herself is whispered about in the town due to her mother’s unusual death. Throughout the
mundane dramas of the unnamed rural neighborhood where most of the novel takes place, Jinhee confides in the reader as she stages narrative disruptions if not reversals of heteropatriarchal
relations concentrated in intimacies of kinship and sexuality. Jin-hee as a narrator is invested in a
language of combat that is preoccupied with the desire to overturn and render powerless the very
scripts of gender and sexuality that dictate her private life of perceiving and feeling her
surroundings, which becomes inextricable from her social, public life of encountering others in
communal spaces. Underlying these scripts is the persistent strain of colonial and postcolonial
state gender ideologies continuing throughout South Korea’s modernity and postdemocratization. These ideologies include the “wise mother, good wife” ideology, a colonial
hybrid of the Chosŏn dynasty’s Confucian ideal of pudŏk (womanly virtues), Japan’s Meiji
gender ideology of ryōsai kenbo (good wife, wise mother), and American Protestant
missionaries’ Victorian ideology of domesticity (Choi 2020, 41) and what Seungsook Moon has
termed “militarized modernity” which pervades the novel through modern notions of femininity
and masculinity in South Korea emphasizing masculine, fascistic military culture and the
relegation of women to the domestic sphere (2005, 50).
Upon its publication, The Bird’s Gift was received in South Korea as a novel that
embodied the individualism of the 1990s, indicative of the turn away from politically salient,
collectivist mentalities of the 1980s in which the struggle for democratization rendered the
function of literature to be in service of revolution. Popular readings of The Bird’s Gift have
emphasized the novel as a harbinger of postmodernism, indicative of the end of an enlightening

47
rationalism rooted in the oppositional culture of the prior decade of the 1980s.23 However, as
South Korean feminist scholars such as Kim Eun-ha (2021) have noted, the novel’s disruptive
questioning of patriarchy has been less focused on in critical discourse. Recently, novels of the
1990s by women, many of which were initially received as inherently postmodern or merely
commercially popular, are being returned to by feminist scholars as texts vital to the
interrogation of contemporary South Korean women’s literature and feminisms.24
The Bird’s Gift begins with a prologue titled, “I did not have to grow up after I turned
twelve.” This declaration of negating and refusing the transition from girlhood to womanhood
introduces a protagonist who refuses to relinquish her memories of girlhood. She is at turns
melancholy and at turns humorous, simultaneously distanced from and attuned to the flows of
power surrounding her. Through the self-proclaimed disaffection of the narrator’s gaze, the novel
challenges its readers to gaze at the seemingly unremarkable details of the everyday to mine
what Kathleen Stewart has termed “rogue intensities” of what is excluded from dominant
“stories of what makes a life” (2007, 44). Eun Hee-kyung imbues everyday, domestic spaces of
disaffected and depressive femininities with criticality, departing from traditional sites of
political salience in modern South Korean literature such as the streets, universities, and
industrial workplaces and posing the question of how to read possibilities of feeling and being
otherwise in seemingly ordinary details.
Diverging from initial readings of Eun Hee-kyung that positioned The Bird’s Gift as a
portent of increasing individualism in 1990s South Korea and consequently a turn away from the
oppositional politics of the previous decade of the 1980s, I offer a reading of the novel that
23 Kim Eun-ha, “The return of female narratives in the 1990s and the end of romantic love – based on Eun Heekyung’s The present of a bird,” 205. 24 For examples of such readings, see Park Hyung-suk (2023)’s article on Eun Hee-kyung, Shin Kyung-sook, and
Jung Kyung-rim and Lee Hye-ryoung (2019)’s article on Shin Kyung-sook.

48
focuses on the gendered politics of the transmission of affect (Teresa Brennan 2004) rather than
the contained inner life of the individual, thus contributing to the growing feminist scholarship
on Eun and her oeuvre. I argue that girlhood’s disaffected gaze in The Bird’s Gift – both emotive
and preoccupied with making sense of emotion – disrupts postcolonial South Korean state
grammars of gender and sexuality through self-reflexive meditations on emotions of love and
sadness which ultimately refute heteropatriarchal ontologies of neighborhood, family, and nation
in the novel. Engaging Xine Yao’s (2021) theorization of disaffection as a tactic from below,
Neetu Khanna’s (2020) theorization of the girl’s narrative gaze as strategic play that generates a
politics of strategic disclosure, and Mary Ann Doane’s (1999) theorization of the masquerade as
a type of feminist representation in conversation with Luce Irigaray, I demonstrate how the
novel’s counter-hegemonic gaze rooted in girlhood purports to maintain a distance from
emotion, while facilitating a heightened awareness of perception of the flows of power that can
be read through people, especially women, being emotionally affected.
Throughout The Bird’s Gift, girlhood’s disaffected gaze transforms into a tactic of
attunement with patriarchal violence and depressive femininity, thus provincializing not only the
heteropatriarchal ontologies of South Korea’s militarized modernity, but also the traditional
heteropatriarchal representations of girls in modern Korean literature that embody undying
innocence (sunjin) and vivacity (yŏllyŏl).25 Indeed, Kim Tong-ni, a Korean writer of “pure
literature,” a right-wing body of literature that championed a spiritual essence that transcends
“the constraints of historical time or materiality” (Eo 2021, 59), wrote in an essay on girlhood

25 Han Chi-hŭi, Uri sidae taejung munhwa wa sonyŏ ŭi kyebohak, 25.

49
(1973) that “girls are flower-like beings who represent the purest aspects of human life.”26 Kim’s
interpretation of girlhood is one example of how girlhood was traditionally represented in
modern Korean literature as innocent and imbued with a pure energy that is divorced from
historicity and materiality. As recent feminist readings of The Bird’s Gift demonstrate, girlhood
becomes the very site of troubling innocence and purity in the novel, offering an alternative
affective genealogy of girlhood that fixates on human sexuality and dirtiness (for example, Jinhee’s fixation on rats and insects).
I interpret the The Bird’s Gift as an interruptive text that disrupts patriarchal Korean
literary representations of girlhood and critiques what becomes affectively sedimented,
circulated, and repeated in everyday life mutually constitutive of a postcolonial national culture
reliant upon the mass mobilization of gendered subjectivities. The novel’s narrativization of
emotions of love and sadness through the disaffected gaze of girlhood refracted through
womanhood positions intertwined acts of watching and feeling as vectors of feminist critique and
truth-telling. The Bird’s Gift illuminates what Phanuel Antwi, Sarah Brophy, Helene Strauss, and
Y-Dang Troeung name “postcolonial intimacies” which reveal “various interruptive texts and
textures that emerge from the accumulated everyday experience of various forms of structural
violence,” foregrounding affect as a basis of exploring injustice, conflict, trauma, and reparation
(2013, 5). Eun Hee-kyung subtly incorporates in The Bird’s Gift emotions tied to gendered
predicaments that ultimately do not serve the disciplinary, masculinist project of national
developmentalism and progressivism. Slogans such as “Let’s Live Better!” and “If We Try, We
Can Do It” alongside the postcolonial South Korean state’s Confucian values disciplined the
26 Kim Tong-ni, “Sonyŏ e taehayŏ,” 95.

50
emotions of South Koreans as developmental subjects under Park Chung-hee’s regime (Jinkyung Lee 2010, 23). The narrative voice of girlhood and womanhood – unruly in its deliberate
play with normative state-sanctioned gender and sexuality – does not champion a singular
political subject and ultimately provincializes patriarchal epistemologies of relationality and
belonging vital to South Korea’s postcolonial race for modernization following the Japanese
Occupation and the Korean War. The narrator’s disaffection and depressive moods, paired with
the implication of an unending girlhood, demonstrates a rewriting of national history through
observations of romantic and familial intimacies that connect “the instability of individual lives
to the trajectory of the collective” (Berlant 1998, 283).
The novel’s narrator and protagonist Jin-hee is rarely cherished, praised, or kept safe by
the world she lives in. She questions the feminine by questioning what is demanded of her. This
process of gazing is inextricable from Jin-hee’s proclivity for satire. Jin-hee frames the gender
norms arising from militarized modernity as theatrical, silly, and humorous. She renders
ridiculous the very roles and rules that dictated and continue to dictate national and familial
belonging dependent upon male kinship. In The Bird’s Gift, Eun Hee-kyung mobilizes a creative,
resourceful witness who has recognized a world hostile to her survival. This witness has set out
to make a play out of the lexicons that constrain her. She is ingeniously attuned to the structures
of feeling latent in national gender ideologies that circumscribe women as child-rearing, passive
partners to breadwinning militant men.
In a recent interview regarding The Bird’s Gift, Eun Hee-kyung expressed that she
wanted to critique “the phoniness and the authority” of rapidly industrializing and modernizing
South Korea through a woman and a child’s voice.27 Eun described the late 1960s, as well as the
27Chŏng Yŏnuk, Shidaeŭi hŏse, aiŭi moksoriro pip'anhago ship'ŏtta,” KBS News, July 18, 2021,
https://news.kbs.co.kr/news/view.do?ncd=5236051

51
decades spanning the Park and Cheon military dictatorships more broadly, as a brutal time when
those who were wounded and left behind by the dictatorship fell victim to the fast-paced,
competitive culture manipulated by the state. It is no coincidence that Eun employed a narrative
perspective that could speak from two marginalized populations, children and women, that were
secondary to the central political subject of the militant male worker in modern South Korean
history. When asked about the ultimate message of The Bird’s Gift, Eun responded that the novel
was a “self-declaration,” claiming that the “soul” or “heart” of the novel could be condensed as
the following declaration: “Even though I am a weak entity and I must follow the roles/values
given to me, even though I accept this system, I am separate/individual.” What can be gleaned
from interviews such as this one is that the novel was written with the intention of privileging a
narrative subjectivity that, despite being unable to escape a system it is a part of, ultimately
disrupts the grammars of power surrounding it.
I read The Bird’s Gift to attend to how Eun Hee-kyung mobilizes girlhood’s disaffected
gaze as an ontological refutation of colonial and postcolonial gender ideologies that permeate
representations of love and sadness in the novel. Each emotion disrupts state-sanctioned
intimacies regulated through militarized modernity, creating a feminist commons of antisociality
and negativity regarding normative intimacies and the promise of female happiness. Seungsook
Moon’s postcolonial feminist study of the gendered mass mobilization of South Korean citizens,
Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea (2005) has been foundational to
this chapter’s understanding of state gender ideologies. As Moon has noted, women under the
military dictatorships were mobilized by the state to control their fertility and manage their
households to contribute to the modern industrial economy while men were mobilized to be
soldiers as a means of “militarized patriotism” which was promoted through schooling and the

52
mass media (2005, 53). These binary archetypes of militarized modernity widely populate The
Bird’s Gift through figures such as the patriotic soldier and the virginal maiden.
In this chapter, I first work through the disaffected gaze of the narrator which is
simultaneously committed to emotional desensitization and hyper-attunement with emotion’s
transmission especially in feminine experiences marginalized in publics of neighborhood and
nation. By theorizing together how Eun’s The Bird’s Gift and Xine Yao’s Disaffected offer a
reformulation of disaffection as grounds for resisting injustice, I frame acts of watching in the
novel as inextricable from acts of feeling. Then, I read recurring representations of love and
sadness in the novel with attention to feminist theories of emotion as well as South Korean
feminist criticism, examining how emotion offers the possibility of an alternative affective
vocabulary of gendered experience that is invested in self-reflexive criticality over citizenship
broadly conceived.28 Lastly, I situate the disaffected gaze and its critical relationship with
emotion as a conduit of queer temporality that reconfigures the progressive temporality of
modernity by bringing to the forefront state and gender violence that remain the same regardless
of time passing.
Girlhood’s Disaffected Gaze as a Tactic from Below
The opening of The Bird’s Gift reveals a narrator and protagonist who lives life by
relying on modes of obduracy, opacity, desensitization, and emotional unavailability which
allows her to assess and critique the dramas of her childhood neighborhood as well as her present
surroundings in a modern South Korean city that is implied to be Seoul. The novel opens with a
scene that provincializes love as a patriarchal emotion through the disaffected gaze of the

28 All translations of The Bird’s Gift employed in this chapter are my own.

53
narrator Jin-hee. As the narrator watches her male lover in an elegant coffee shop in 1990s Seoul,
her lover proceeds to discuss the seduction of the night before, and while Jin-hee plays the part
of the smiling, listening woman, she confides in the reader that she is, in fact, coolly observing
him from the opposite end of the table as her eyes dart between him and the rat visible just
outside the window. The proximity of vermin to male love interests is one of Eun Hee-kyung’s
signature literary moves. In a loose sequel to The Bird’s Gift titled Save the Last Dance
(Majimak ch'umŭn nawa hamkke, 1998), the female protagonist – a professor in her late thirties
who is in a relationship with three men – describes one of her lovers in proximity to a cockroach
that climbs the wall next to him as they share a conversation in a grimy bar. As Jin-hee provides
a detailed account of the rat, grouping an object of attachment (the lover) with an object of
disgust (the rat), she confides in the reader that this habit of gazing straight at disgusting,
potentially dangerous entities is an old habit: “Even now I stare straight at the object in question
in order to overcome repugnance and loathing, and even love” (Eun 1995, 10). Jin-hee later
clarifies that love permits her to serve men, likening the emotion to “a title rather than a
hypocrisy” (Eun 1995, 14). By hypocrisy, Jin-hee alludes to her habit of keeping multiple male
lovers. She feels no qualms about her behavior because, according to her, love is an inherently
patriarchal emotion, rendering it nothing more than a title, a superficiality, a performance. From
the beginning of the novel, the emotion of love is framed through negativity, narrated as an
emotion that must be overcome as vermin must be overcome or exterminated, performing a
decided antisociality that is suspicious of love.
The disaffected gaze senses, reads, and embodies the possibility of insurgence through
the overturning of acceptable orders, such as women serving men, thus rendering possible the
legibility of new emotional reflexes sedimented in subjectivities coded as minor in the

54
patriarchal collectives such as neighborhood and nation. For example, Jin-hee’s intensive selfimposed training to gaze at objects of disgust such as insects and male genitalia stages the
controlled play with the taboo of talking openly about sexuality stemming from the modern
concept of sexuality purity (sun'gyŏl), a norm imposed upon the general public by the modern
South Korean state as a means of control and governance.29 The gaze, in this case, combats a
force that tries to “force their disgustingness” onto her, wresting power from entities that try to
“force” an emotion or sensation onto the self. These meditations on training hearken back to the
beginning of the novel when Jin-hee discusses the rat in proximity to her lover, as she likens her
training with insects to her training with men, placing vermin alongside those who she sees as
the main actors and perpetrators of patriarchal love.
Jin-hee’s training is ocular and emotional, gazing at what is prohibited in everyday
discourse, channeling disgust as an opportunity to combat the tacit power of the phallus by
staring at it. Jin-hee proclaims that the aspect of men’s genitals that bothers her the most is their
mystification: “What plagues me is not the sexual meaning of men’s genitals but simply the fact
that those genitals are hidden inside pants” (113). She is not plagued by men’s sexuality, or the
sexual potential and/or meaning of these genitals; she is plagued by their “hidden” nature.
“Hidden” can be interpreted as a wider condition that permeates the latent control of sexuality in
the patriarchal domestic relations of militarized modernity. Through her narrative play, ranging
from her piercing analysis of genitals to the theatricality of courtship, Jin-hee manipulates what
is hidden and makes it public.

29Ko Mi-suk, Yŏnae ŭi sidae, 119.

55
From the beginning of the novel, the act of seeing or watching asserts itself as crucial to
Jin-hee’s way of being a woman in South Korean society. Jin-hee confides in the reader:
I am always watching myself. I make it so that the ‘me that looks’ watches as the
‘me that is seen’ takes the lead. This habit of observing my every move in detail through
the me in my interior is a habit of way over twenty years.
My life is sustained by the tension that goes into continuously maintaining the
distance between myself and life. I want to observe my life from a distance at all times
(1995, 12).
Watching is imperative; she is “always watching.” Watching is self-reflexive, a means of
regulating the self and orienting the self in relation to the objects around oneself. Watching
permeates Jin-hee’s lived experience as it is part of the very texture of her survival in spaces that
are hostile to her thriving. Watching divides Jin-hee into two selves: the “me that looks” and the
“me that is seen.” Passages such as the one above suggest that the “me that is seen” is intricately
controlled by the “me that looks,” the interior self that is closest to the speaking “I” that narrates
the entire novel.
What prompts this disaffected gazing from a distance, the impulse to group a rat in the
same category as a man? How can we understand the disaffected gaze that formed during
girlhood that applies the same observational technique to vermin and to sex acts? From the very
beginning of the novel, we witness a woman who is invested in the toppling of hierarchies, of the
“natural” order of things. The narrative fixation on overcoming potential threats to one’s safety
never wanes throughout The Bird’s Gift. Jin-hee’s goal is to best the threats that are undeniable
and latent in the very fabric of everyday interactions. Thus, watching becomes a means to
regulate vulnerability, to hide wounds, and to be seemingly impervious to the objects she comes

56
into contact with. And yet Jin-hee is not impervious. In fact, what permeates her interactions is a
deep understanding of things gone wrong, what others are feeling, etc. Her interiority is not
simply interior or private; her thoughts and emotions are constantly inflected by the transmission
of affect from others around her, to borrow from Teresa Brennan (2004). Gazing becomes more
than mere coping mechanism in the face of power; it becomes a means of deconstructing that
power, of measuring justice.
The “tension” of continuously maintaining distance between the self and the objects one
encounters in life such as the lover or the rat – a tension that is maintained through Jin-hee’s
disaffected gaze – generates a mode of feminist representation in the novel that is reminiscent of,
but ultimately goes askew from, Mary Ann Doane’s psychoanalytic theorization of the
masquerade regarding representations of women in cinema in conversation with Luce Irigaray.
Doane argues that the masquerade flaunts femininity by holding it at a distance, positioning
“womanliness” as “a mask which can be worn or removed,” manufacturing a distance from the
image of the woman “to generate a problematic within which the image is manipulable,
producible, and readable by the woman.”30 The masquerade, which Doane associates with
excessive femininity, is positioned as “a type of representation which carries a threat,
disarticulating male systems of viewing.”31 While Jin-hee’s disaffected gaze in The Bird’s Gift
does not necessarily distance itself from the image of woman, it does create a “[system] of
viewing” that applies the same observational technique to vermin and to heteronormative
sexuality, embodying an ocular-affective drive to trouble the natural or taken-for-granted order
of human attachments (lover over vermin, for example). Although Jin-hee does partake in a sort
of masquerade of femininity (her attentive behavior towards her unnamed lover at the beginning
30 Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” 138, 143. 31 Ibid, 139.

57
of the novel, for example), her disaffected gaze ultimately mirrors and transforms the
masculinities and femininities that surround her. Rather than identify with the masculine and
spurn the feminine, the disaffected gaze mirrors masculine militancy by employing words
reminiscent of combat in scenes of watching and feeling rooted in the ordinariness of feminine
life. These words include but are not limited to “overcome,” “surrender,” “war,” “manifesto,”
and “revolt” (Eun 1995, 10, 76, 144). By applying such a poetics of combat to acts of gazing and
feeling in the novel, a poetics facilitated by the disaffected gaze, Eun Hee-kyung stages a mode
of feminist representation that threatens the militarized gender binary vital to the making of the
modern South Korean subject.
Jin-hee’s ambivalence towards expressing emotion, and her contradictory attitudes
regarding emotion in relation to her own as well as other women’s experiences, illuminates a
wider problem perpetuated by the militarized modernity around her: the eradication of
subjectivity in the face of gendered mass mobilization, as well as the deep-rooted hostility
towards feminine identities and energies that cannot be contained in the bounds of male kinship.
Early in the novel, Jin-hee overhears two female relatives gossiping about her mother’s implied
suicide, wondering aloud if the daughter will also be affected by her mother’s malady. The
grandmother quickly corrects the two relatives, assuring them that the “illness,” depression, is
not hereditary. Yet Jin-hee is profoundly affected by this conversation. This scene marks the
moment Jin-hee decides to harden herself against emotions. Jin-hee learns from her grandmother
that “one must retain emotional equilibrium in order not to be made to surrender to another”
(144). Thus, for the protagonist of The Bird’s Gift, emotion becomes a site of a power struggle
that is inextricable from the condition of female depression.

58
The disaffected gaze in The Bird’s Gift becomes a protective and resistant tactic in the
face of the threat of being coerced into submitting to another, in this case, by being affected or
emotionally moved by the other.32 My engagement with disaffection is indebted to Xine Yao’s
definitions of disaffection as “withholding, disregard, growing a thick skin, refusing to care,
opacity, numbness, dissociation, inscrutability, frigidity, insensibility, obduracy, flatness,
insensitivity, disinterest, coldness, heartlessness, fatigue, desensitization, and emotional
unavailability” (2021, 11). By lingering at affective orientations of negativity, refusal, and
antisociality, the disaffected gaze in The Bird’s Gift employs what Neetu Khanna has described
as “strategic play” or “strategic manipulation of what gets seen and what remains outside the
optic frame” in the narrative (2020, 95). Girlhood’s disaffected gaze destabilizes the ideological
function of romantic, heteronormative love as a means to achieve the nuclear family model in
postcolonial South Korean society. The normalization of the heterosexual conjugal relationship
was at the core of South Korea’s modernization as evidenced by state efforts such as the Family
Planning Program by the Planned Parenthood Federation of Korea (Taehan Kajok Kyehoek
Hyophoe) linking romantic love to heterosexual monogamy and planned pregnancy.33 Traces of
such state biopolitics can be found in the novel through figures of the soldier and virginal maiden
idealized as the perfect couple, as well as allusions to contraceptives such as a condom found in a
communal toilet. Love was touted as foundational for a modern, desirable life, and the emotion
became a vital tool for mass mobilizing the postcolonial nation towards a more “Western”
conceptualization of modernity that emphasized individuality and autonomy.
32 Numerous other works of South Korean women’s literature of the 1990s employ disaffected female subjectivities
including the novel I Wish for What is Forbidden to Me (Nanŭn somanghanda naege kŭmjidoen kŏsŭl, 1992) by
Yang Gui-ja and the short story “The Dreaming Incubator” (Kkumkkunŭn ink'yubeit'ŏ, 1993) by Pak Wan-sŏ. 33 Eunjoo Cho, “Making the ‘modern’ family: The discourse of sexuality in the Family Planning Program in South
Korea,” 812.

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In The Bird’s Gift, the emotion of love becomes an object of the disaffected narrator’s
self-reflexive meditations on normative intimacy. It is worth noting that the narrator participates
in the very rituals of love she provincializes, and previous readings of the novel have reframed
the novel as a text that possesses a fiery longing for love through its consistent evocation of the
emotion despite the novel’s popular reception as a cynical text (Kim 2016, 226). Building from
and also diverging from recent feminist reframings of the novel, I propose to read love in The
Bird’s Gift as an emotion that betrays the ambivalent condition of loving another which, as Sara
Ahmed has theorized (2014, 125), generates negative orientations towards the power that such
love gives to another. Thus, love in the novel enables systemic accounts of power through the
documentation of everyday life. The narrative manipulation of love as a site of feminist critique
in The Bird’s Gift mirrors a larger trend in South Korean women’s literature of the 1990s of
challenging and interrogating the heteronormative romantic experience from depressive female
perspectives.
Jin-hee’s disaffected observations on love reveal a hybrid subjectivity rooted in girlhood
and womanhood that finds it necessary to repeatedly stage a rupture from these affective
workings of ideology in lived experience.34 Instead of framing love as desirable for girls and
women, Jin-hee frames love as a superficiality, a play to act in. One of the novel’s staged
ruptures from love involves a fifth-grade classmate, a made-up love letter, and excrement in a
comedic episode where Jin-hee seeks revenge against her fifth-grade classmate nicknamed
Changguni or “little general” by his doting mother, a widow of a first sergeant in the South
Korean army. Changguni, painted as a timid child afraid of violence, is encouraged by his
mother to become a great general to carry on his father’s legacy. Jin-hee wryly comments on the
34 Here I turn to Xine Yao’s interpretation of Raymond Williams’ definition of structures of feeling (2021, 6).

60
mother’s “militaristic spirit” (sangmu jongshin), recounting her ridiculous response to
Changguni’s innocent question whether his father died in Yuk-i-o (translated to “625,” a
colloquial Korean term for the Korean War which began on June 25, 1950) which has become
neighborhood lore: that if he had been born ten years earlier, he most certainly would have died
in the war (43). Changguni’s mother believes that her child will reach military greatness if he
reads the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Samgukchi), a fourteenth century historical novel
that dramatizes the lives of feudal lords during the Three Kingdoms period in Chinese history.
Jin-hee’s vendetta begins when the mother tells Jin-hee’s grandmother that she would not be able
to read through the entirety of Samgukchi no matter how smart she is since she is just a little girl
destined for marriage and child-rearing, as opposed to her Changguni who is a boy destined for
heroic exploits. Jin-hee plots her revenge carefully, manipulating Changguni’s attraction to her
by suggesting to him that another classmate gave her a love letter. Under Changguni’s anxious
gaze, she then pretends to go to the outhouse with the so-called letter, exiting without the random
piece of paper. Changguni falls into Jin-hee’s trap as he topples head-first into the toilet – what
Jin-hee gleefully narrates as the ttongt’ong or literally, “crap container” – in search of the letter.
Jin-hee’s revenge introduces excrement to the drama of upholding patrilineal, militaristic,
masculine pride, manipulating and ultimately provincializing “militarized patriotism”
disseminated by Park Chung Hee’s dictatorship (Moon 2005, 53) which permeates the
postcolonial intimacies of the neighborhood such as the drama between Jin-hee and Changguni’s
family.
The Judge in Her Heart
The Bird’s Gift is punctuated by scenes in which Jin-hee exercises her judgment in
silence, or more specifically in her own head. Only the reader seems to have access to her

61
thoughts, which are carefully concealed from the other characters in the novel. For example,
when Jin-hee happens upon a naked woman at a bathhouse, she is fascinated by the woman’s
plenteous pubic hairs. The woman happens to be one of her previous teachers. The woman’s
pubic hairs remind Jin-hee of the erotic novel that she found in her uncle’s room, a novel that
contains the phrase, “Set fire to her pubic hairs!” It turns out the novel’s plot follows a so-called
loose woman who seduces a naïve boxer who is unable to perform in an important match due to
his sleeplessness caused by her seductive powers. The boxer’s manager, a ferocious gangster,
punishes the woman by stripping her naked and setting fire to her pubic hairs with his lighter.
Jin-hee is afterwards quite fixated on the image of burning pubic hairs. When she encounters the
teacher in the bathhouse, she imagines setting the hairs ablaze. After witnessing her teacher’s
pubic hairs, Jin-hee is gripped by severe guilt. She feels as if she has transgressed because she
has utilized her imagination in relation to sex which is forbidden. To work through this guilt, Jinhee calls upon “the judge in [her] heart”:
The judge in my heart reached a verdict.
If a taboo has not been created, then the crime of breaking the taboo cannot exist.
Therefore, it is decided that guilt has been unjustly forced onto the defendant. However, I
do not feel the need to declare the defendant innocent. Because the truth is that the
defendant herself does not feel any guilt and is simply going through the guilt forced
upon her.
The judge’s words were right. After careful self-reflection, I realized that I did not
feel any guilt whatsoever and was only feeling the discomfort from taboos imposed upon
a child (125).

62
In this passage, Jin-hee summons the figure of the judge, which curiously lies not in her
head, but in her heart. Logic is not attributed to the head, but to the heart, or more specifically the
Korean word maum which can be translated as “heart” or “soul.” Emotions are inextricable from
an understanding of maum and indeed the emotion of guilt is what triggers Jin-hee’s summoning
of the judge in the first place. Jin-hee’s judge reaches the verdict that she has in fact done
nothing wrong by glimpsing the schoolteacher’s pubic hairs, or by secretly witnessing the
forbidden content of her uncle’s erotic novel. She has simply been exposed to unspoken taboos
surrounding sex – more specifically, women’s sexuality, as evidenced by Jin-hee’s fascination
with the burning pubic hairs of the seductress in the novel as well as her teacher’s naked body in
the bathhouse. Jin-hee situates herself as an innocent victim of “guilt forced upon her,” guilt that
is confused with “discomfort from taboos imposed upon a child.”
The judge in Jin-hee’s heart, then, incorporates emotions into judgment. Judgment is not
possible without a sensitivity to emotion. Here I turn to sadness and how it as an emotion is
related to Jin-hee’s judgment, which in turn is inseparable from Jin-hee’s role as a witness.
Sadness as an emotion is primarily associated with the death of Jin-hee’s mother. Jin-hee
narrates:
After I heard that story I did not think of mom again. I was not even curious anymore.
Because I felt sadness from that story, and I was wary of that sadness becoming a
weakness to me. I did not want to feel pity for me or my mom. To have a wound that
feels pain whenever it is touched is to lose your ability to control your life. I did not want
to live according to the motives of the person who touched my wound (145).
Jin-hee associates sadness with weakness. The story of her mother’s death makes her feel
sadness, which she interprets as a “weakness” that is not unlike a wound. Sadness poses a loss of

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control because it enables another to touch one’s wound. Love, on the other hand, is all about
control in the novel. The definition of love is meticulously controlled not only by the state, but
also by everyday people who believe that the highest form of love is between a patriotic young
man, preferably a soldier, and a chaste young woman whose sole purpose is to be a wife and
mother. According to Jin-hee, wounds must be hidden and sadness must be gazed at in order to
neutralize its devastating effects.
Sadness. That’s right. What floods my heart is plain sadness. However, I am slowly
dividing myself within my conscience. The “I that feels sadness” and the “I that
watches.” Extreme training begins. The “I that watches” stares piercingly at the “I that
feels sadness” for a long time. If you keep pouring cold water onto yourself little by little,
you no longer feel the cold… Let’s feel sadness, and let’s gaze at it stubbornly, straight
on (209).
This is the sole moment in the novel when Jin-hee declares that she is overcome by
sadness. And yet, narratively, this passage performs the tactic of unfeeling Jin-hee refuses to
abandon from beginning to end of the novel. Sadness floods her heart. Its feeling is “plain,”
perhaps to signify that it cannot be denied, at least in this moment. Then, she consciously divides
herself into a self that feels and a self that watches or sees. This division is playfully referred to
as “extreme training,” a kind of self-disciplining that relies on the function of watching, seeing,
gazing. As one pours cold water onto oneself little by little to grow numb to the uncomfortable
sensation, Jin-hee numbs herself to sadness. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she
claims to numb herself to sadness.
What Jin-hee calls “the judge in my heart” acts as an arbiter of justice in an environment
where most expressions of feminine life are stifled, shamed, and disappeared. The environment

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of the neighborhood, inseparable from the authoritarian military state, treats women’s sexuality
as a taboo. Female figures alienated from motherhood and wifehood such as the homeless
woman or “crazy bitch,” the single schoolteacher, and Jin-hee herself, are coded as deviant from
the acceptable feminine. In their refusal to belong to a state-sanctioned gendered grammar, these
female figures transform the patriarchal discourses of femininity transcribed onto them. Jin-hee’s
“judge” – the moral and emotional center of the novel – develops in rapidly industrializing,
postcolonial South Korea where the psychic effects of empire is alluded to through the hypermilitarization of masculinity and the wise mother, good wife ideology.
Leigh Gilmore defines the conventional understanding of testimony as “verbal acts in
which a person bears witness to harm in a public forum” (2017, 3). Testimony, according to
Gilmore, does not begin or end with a single speech act; rather, testimony is an ongoing process
or form through which those who have been harmed may claim a right to speak, to be heard, and
to seek justice (24). When verbal records are impossible, testimonial records exist within “the
history of bodies of those excluded from the public square as full citizens” (4). How might we
understand Gilmore’s formulations of testimony in the context of fiction? Indeed, The Bird’s Gift
could be read as one woman’s record of a life negotiated in the currents of national transitions
from colony to military state to civil democracy. Jin-hee’s acts of bearing witness are not
necessarily verbal – they are often self-reflexive and internalized, rooted in her sprawling moral
and emotional epistemologies. Jin-hee’s recollections of her girlhood form a sort of public that
only Jin-hee and her listeners, the readership of the novel, have access to. Eun Hee-kyung creates
a public that takes as its authority a woman who consistently evokes the spirit of a twelve-yearold girl. The Bird’s Gift explores the (im)possibility of justice through the subjectivities of those

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who have been rendered ghostly in South Korea’s race for modernity, namely women and the
working class.
Through Jin-hee’s interior monologues and observations of the everyday, Eun blurs the
lines separating emotion and logic, the norm and the exceptional, the childish and the mature, the
domestic and the public, and even the masculine and the feminine. The interior utterances in A
Gift from a Bird are not confined by space or even time. Jin-hee’s narration exists continuously
inside the home, outside the home, through the 1960s and the 1990s. By examining the
unexamined and recording the unrecorded, Jin-hee’s interiority in A Gift from a Bird becomes
deeply political and even public, quite different from the privatized and domesticated paradigm
of interiority in 1990s literature, characterized as antithesis to the more politically oriented 1980s
literature (Bae 2016). Through Jin-hee’s awareness of her own interiority, Eun gives us a
glimpse into how material realities are mediated by emotion. She suggests that external, material
realities are inseparable from the emotional world of inner consciousness, which in and of itself
becomes a lived and negotiated truth or reality. The Bird’s Gift is more matter-of-fact than
confessional and is ultimately concerned with acts of truth telling that pierce through the systems
that govern adult life, such as the silence surrounding domestic abuse or the condemnation of
feminine sexuality.
Sadness and Feminine Beings: Reading Affectability as a Gendered Predicament
Episodes such as Jin-hee’s revenge on Changguni reveal a protagonist who dedicated
much of her girlhood to the tactical staging of those who, through their being emotionally
moved, expose the taken-for-granted regimes of gender normativity that permeate the novel on
the level of everyday life in the neighborhood. Such a tactical staging is rendered possible

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through a gaze originating in girlhood. The self-reflexivity of this gaze – preoccupied with not
only the objects of the self’s surroundings but also how the self responds to those objects –
becomes a means of deconstructing power and measuring the possibility or impossibility of
justice on Jin-hee’s own terms. While Eun Hee-kyung creates a protagonist who claims to be
disaffected by what is happening around her, such purported disaffection makes room for acts of
observing, reading, and making public negative feminine emotions rooted in domestic life that
have been ignored or disappeared. In other words, disaffection renders possible a heightened
sensitivity to how people are affected. This sensitivity is forged from the narrator’s expansive
affective consciousness, a thick textured system with its own codes of justice. Eun Hee-kyung
positions Jin-hee as an unrecognized moral authority of the novel’s world who determines
whether certain situations are just or unjust through her own emotional instincts, and it is her
emotional “eye” that aligns itself with the depressive female figures that populate The Bird’s
Gift.
The female figures that surface in The Bird’s Gift, objects of observation and fellow
feeling for the protagonist, are figures that signal affectability as a feminized predicament. I
follow Denise Ferreira da Silva’s (2007, xv) definition of affectability as the condition of being
subjected to another’s power, as well as Teresa Brennan’s concept of the transmission of affect
which discusses how the individual is not self-contained in terms of “energies,” that there is “no
secure distinction between the ‘individual’ and the ‘environment’” (2004, 6). Brennan defines
“feminine beings” as “those who carry the negative affects for the other” (2004, 15). In the
postcolonial intimacies of the neighborhood, characterized by the porous energies of emotion
that suffuse individuals and the neighborhood, the women Jin-hee simultaneously distances
herself from and aligns herself with are feminine beings who carry, struggle against, and even

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perpetuate the negative effects of heteropatriarchy that relegates married women to reproductive
labor and unmarried women to chastity. These feminine beings include strangers, neighbors, and
blood relatives such as Soon-boon, the wife of the local tailor who regularly suffers abuse from
her husband and Jin-hee’s aunt who is openly scorned by her mother and brother for speaking
about dating and sex. Despite refusing to be like these women, Jin-hee aligns herself with them,
often fixating on the unjust nature of their situations, privileging their predicaments in her
narrations. The repeated observations of these women, and the ensuing reflections which often
circle back to the protagonist’s own desire to be invulnerable, shows how affectability is a key
feminist problematic in the novel.
The emotion of sadness in The Bird’s Gift becomes a key site of the feminized
predicament of affectability in the novel, unlike the scriptedness of love that serves a patriarchal
collective. Sadness surfaces when the façade of love becomes no longer tenable. It is the one
emotion that affects the disaffected girl and woman, disrupting the claim to disaffection and thus
producing critical tension between the desire to be disaffected and the inescapability of being
affected by the punishing effects of heteropatriarchy which are transmitted between women in
the novel. If sadness is the emotion that most affects Jin-hee, then it is arguably a site of
heightened interest to the feminist reader, for it is where the gendered crisis of affectability is
unraveled in the text. Sadness as an emotion is primarily associated with Jin-hee’s reckoning
with the implied suicide of her depressed mother, thus becoming an emotion that is not only
rooted in an absent female figure that haunts the novel, but also the echoing or mirroring of
depressive feminine orientations across generations. According to Jin-hee’s densely imagined
ontology of emotion, sadness is a liability in the project of controlling one’s life, as it springs
from “a wound that feels pain whenever it is touched” (Eun 1995, 209). Jin-hee incorporates

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sadness, as she does emotions of disgust and love, into her so-called training, a vital project that
prevents the control of one’s life by more powerful others. It becomes clear throughout the novel
that this project – the purpose of Jin-hee’s self-proclaimed disaffection – stems from a feminized
predicament of affectability.
The potential connection between sadness and sensibilities of revolt repressed in the
novel’s postcolonial intimacies can be further examined upon turning to a passage about a
neighbor suffering domestic abuse who Jin-hee particularly feels for. Jin-hee describes the
“Gwangjin Tailor auntie,” wife of the local philandering tailor, as sheltering repressive sadness
and suffering that embodies latent possibilities of revolt:
But from the way I saw it, her expression did not contain the composure after one
hears about a war that has long since ended, but rather a foreboding like the calm before
the storm. I thought about how I had no idea what manifesto of revolt her tongue was
screaming in her tightly closed mouth. That unreleased suffering tightly packed in her
breast could someday burst forth with explosive intensity (Eun 1995, 76).
Despite the apparent restraint and self-discipline that the Gwangjin Tailor auntie exhibits – “her
tightly closed mouth” – what lingers in Jin-hee’s mind is the potentially disruptive, even
revolutionary energetic latent within the repression of her suffering: “what manifesto of revolt
her tongue was screaming in her tightly closed mouth.” What is forcibly suppressed or silenced
is, according to Jin-hee’s imagination, a “manifesto of revolt.” This forceful phrase connotes a
public declaration of policies, beliefs, and aims of rebellion, as well as the possibility of change.
Jin-hee concludes her analysis of Soon-boon’s suffering by establishing what she sees as the
hidden truth: “The true secret she was guarding might have been the fact that she was storing that
suffering, stuffing it deep inside her breast.” In Jin-hee’s eyes, Soon-boon’s true secret, the secret

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only she knows, is the fact that Soon-boon is “guarding” and “storing” her suffering. This
passage, similar to many other moments in the novel, establishes feminine emotional negativity
as a hidden truth that must be foregrounded.
We can connect the silenced scream in The Bird’s Gift with the silenced screams in
Mackerel and Go Alone Like the Rhinoceros Horn by Gong Ji-young discussed in my previous
chapter. Like in Gong’s novels, the silenced scream in The Bird’s Gift gestures towards a
community that has yet to come into being. This emergent sense of community recognizes the
scream, transforming it into more than a well-kept secret, closer to a potential expression of
complaint. The Gwangjin Tailor auntie’s silent scream illuminates moments in women’s writing
and expression that possess a force rawer and more immediate than the societal system of signs
that surrounds it. It is, as Sin Su-chŏng has argued, “a language that cannot be verbalized” (2003,
20). Sin’s interpretation of women’s writing as a chaotic, ambivalent language that continually
shuttles between suffering and jouissance informs the semantics and semiotics of girlhood’s
disaffected gaze attuned to women’s sadness that remain emergent and ultimately unable to be
captured in the language of the novel.
Disaffection and Emotion as Conduits of Queer Temporality
The Bird’s Gift deliberately blurs the boundary between past and present, girlhood and
womanhood. Jinhee narrates: “Although it’s the 90s now, the world flows as it did in the 60s,
when I was twelve. I didn’t have to grow up after twelve years of age… I am looking at the rat.
The peaceful and glinting small eyes of the rat that travels the toilet pit and the drain hole, its
long flowing tail, and those gray routines that were neither serious nor vile” (Eun 1995, 387).
The novel begins and ends with the contemplation of a rat, an entity from the dark underbelly of

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human life that is representative of and survives the tedium of everyday life. The rat is a dirty,
ugly, omnipresent creature, a constant despite the passing of time, potentially transgressive in its
defiance of linear time. The cyclical appearance of the rat from girlhood to womanhood in The
Bird’s Gift, as well as Jin-hee’s claim that the world flows as it did in the 1960s even in the
1990s, suggests that the powers that governed girlhood still govern womanhood. Regardless of
the advent of South Korean democracy in the 1990s and the toppling of the military regime, the
colonial gender ideologies and mass gendered mobilization of citizens under militarized
modernity still permeate the everyday texture of life decades after their inception.
In another passage towards the end of the novel, Jin-hee suggests that the violent
consequences of modernity suffuse the present 1990s, citing the cyclical repetitions of state
violence, militarism, and the exploitation of industrial and reproductive labor:
It’s the 90s now, but even now the world is no different from my childhood years.
Still, there is a Vietnam War happening somewhere in the world, children are learning
hypocrisy and spite from their teachers, the Lee Hyoung-ryeols are searching for lovers
as they serve in the military… and the Gwangjin Tailor auntie digs a hole further down
into her fate by getting pregnant with a second child. Miss Jang’s husbands are still in jail
and unexpected disasters like the fire at the oil plant endlessly mass murder people, and
those disasters are forgotten only to be repeated… (430).
This passage implies that despite the national teleology of progress championed by male
dictators, intellectuals, and government officials, progress is an empty signifier easily shattered
by disasters that permeate both the modern and the postmodern. Jin-hee’s narration emphasizes
repetitions in history, generating a queer temporality that interrupts linear national timelines. In
her discussion of queer temporality, Elizabeth Freeman has noted that “… naked flesh is bound

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into socially meaningful embodiment through temporal regulation” (2010, 3). The Bird’s Gift
engenders a means of thinking about gender and sexuality that is not always obedient to temporal
regulation and social embodiment as propagated by the modernizing, democratizing South
Korean state. Time, according to the Park Chung-hee and Cheon Doo-hwan regimes, meant
moving forwards by controlling people’s bodily and psychic lives. Time according to Jin-hee, on
the other hand, means witnessing, feeling, and judging what permeates the lives of gendered
subjects by staying the same. Jin-hee is dedicated to “a commitment to bodily potentiality that
neither capitalism nor heterosexuality can fully contain” (Freeman 2010, 19). Jin-hee’s refusal to
grow up queers the biopolitical meaning of woman as monogamous and child-bearing according
to the modernizing South Korean state.
Acts of gazing and feeling by the hybrid girl/woman narrator in The Bird’s Gift reorient
justice as a deeply emotional problematic. The novel asks what it means to feel injustice and
what it means to be a witness to the self and others in a postcolonial culture that is founded upon
the mass mobilization of gendered subjects, responding by attending to the emotive reflexes of
feminine beings who bear the brunt of the negative affects around them. As evidenced by the rat
Jin-hee gazes at from girlhood to womanhood, traveling from South Korea’s race for modernity
under the postcolonial authoritarian state to the globalizing democracy of the 1990s, the “gray
routines” of postcolonial intimacies persist (Eun 1995, 387). Disaffection and emotion in The
Bird’s Gift become conduits of queer temporality, inseparable from a feminist temporality that
has been repeatedly evoked in recent readings of South Korean women’s literature, in which the
lives and voices of generations of women converge and intervene with one another, opposing a
monolithic evolutionary temporality (Hye-ryoung Lee 2021, 215).

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Conclusion: Feeling Otherwise
Eun Hee-kyung mobilizes girlhood’s disaffected gaze in The Bird’s Gift to reveal how
postcolonial grammars of gender and sexuality in the South Korean context are disrupted
through the narrator’s emotional mode of disaffection as well as her self-reflexive critiques of
emotions of love and sadness. By situating emotion as a site of postcolonial intimacies in which
colonial and postcolonial ideologies of gender and sexuality are manipulated and transformed,
this chapter argues that girlhood’s disaffected gaze refutes heteropatriarchal ontologies that
continue from modernity to postmodernity. Eun Hee-kyung positions the disaffected woman who
refuses to forget memories of girlhood as an arbiter of queer and feminist temporality alternative
to the linear, progressive temporality of modernity through her refusal to grow up and her
fixation on what has not changed. The Bird’s Gift contributes to an understanding of
postcolonialism as indicative of “aftermaths, the persistence of pasts in the present… the
impossibility – and undesirability – of drawing definitive lines between a before and after”
(Watson 2018, 3).
I conclude my study of The Bird’s Gift by turning to contemporary South Korean women
writers who have noted Eun Hee-kyung’s tremendous influence in South Korean women’s
literature.
The literary critic Paek Ji-eun declares that reading Eun Hee-kyung helped her feel “brave in the
face of love”:
These stories showed me why I want to cry even though no one cried and taught
me something despite never preaching anything. It was because I read these stories that I
was able to be brave in the face of love. I vowed to myself that I would voluntarily walk
into loneliness. I faked the cool composure of someone who knows a joke or two. It was

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like I had tasted the melancholic optimism that embraces imperfect life. We learned
something. And from that moment of learning our disappointed hearts were comforted
and the wounds could hurt less. We were determined to become her readers (136).
According to Paek, the “cool composure” and “melancholic optimism” – a potential nod to the
disaffected gaze of girlhood in The Bird’s Gift – not only galvanized her as a loyal reader but
also soothed her “wounds.” Eun’s writing, in this case, is likened to a recuperative force and a
call to transformation. Similarly, Chong Se-rang, bestselling author of the feminist novel From
Shisŏn (Shisŏnŭrobut'ŏ, 2020), has called Eun Hee-kyung “My Eun Hee-kyung, the light we all
walk by” (138). Chong has written that “To read Eun is to listen to contemporary Korean
women’s voices… We listened to those women’s voices and those women reflected our lives”
(2020, 138).
Eun has increasingly been discussed as a writer of feminist fiction despite her initial
reception in the 1990s as a writer of cynical individualism. Her iconic representations of girls
and women, especially in The Bird’s Gift, have recently begun to be reframed through feminist
readers’ reflections on reading and writing that could be characterized as autotheoretical. It
would not be an exaggeration to posit that Eun Hee-kyung has become a writer who inspires
women readers to feel impassioned to look closely at the conditions of their own lives in a South
Korean present riddled with rising tides of misogyny and conservatism. By attending to how
disaffection and feminine affectability illuminate the gendered lexicons that implicate her
readers, Eun Hee-kyung leads us to reading and writing practices that return to the question of
what it means to feel otherwise.

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Chapter 3: Feeling Askew
Errantry in Jeong Jae-eun and Kim Bora’s Films
In attending to how gendered subjects move through the world in cinema, we may
interrogate how these subjects are emotionally and physically moved in proximity to those in
similar predicaments. This chapter proposes to read representations of errantry in Take Care of
My Cat (Koyangirŭl put'akhae, 2001) directed by Jeong Jae-eun and House of Hummingbird
(Pŏlsae, 2018) directed by Kim Bora, two films that contribute to a continuing genealogy of
feminist filmmaking in South Korea. Take Care of My Cat was released in 2001 during a
moment in the South Korean film scene that has been referred to as New Korean Cinema,
defined by the creation of an industry dominated by young filmmakers, domestic box-office
successes, changes in availability of production capital, and the emergence of the Korean
blockbuster (Stringer 2005, 6). Seventeen years later, House of Hummingbird made a similar
intervention through its attention to girls’ and women’s coming-of-age, contributing to the
contemporary renaissance of South Korean feminist arts in the 2010s following the South
Korean #MeToo movement and the 2016 Gangnam Station femicide. Departing from the
masculinist auteurs of New Korean Cinema such as Lee Chang-dong, Kim Ki-duk, and Hong
Sang-soo, Jeong Jae-eun and Kim Bora explore themes and subjectivities that privilege the
everyday experiences of female youth. This chapter is an exercise in returning to Jeong and
Kim’s seminal feminist films with a heightened attention to emotionally inflected cinematic
representations of South Korean girls and young women who go astray from the heteronormative
nuclear family and ethnonational identity.

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“Women’s film” in South Korea has positioned film as a means of feminist critique and
activism.35 Women’s film as a critical genre in Korean cinema has been explored with
consideration to the emergence of female directors in the 1990s. South Korean women’s film in
the 1990s brought with it the coupling of social concerns with “reading against the grain,” the
articulation of feminism and Marxism, and the festival site as an alternative public sphere (Kim
1998, 14). In addition, women’s film or yŏsŏng yŏnghwa in the 1990s became a means to rename
female audience-targeted films. The reappropriation of the term yŏsŏng (over terms yŏja which is
closer to the connotation of “female” and yŏryu which is closer to the connotation of “lady”) to
describe film marks a departure from the derogatory appellation of female audience-targeted
films as “weepies” in previous decades. “Feminist film” and “women’s film” are used
interchangeably in contemporary South Korean critical discourse, suggesting that women’s film
connotes an incorporation of feminist practice in filmmaking.36 Before the 1990s, most women
in South Korean films were relegated to figures of the lover, the wife, the mother, and the sex
worker. Under the slogan of the “personal is political,” women’s seemingly mundane stories
were expanded to the political in South Korea as films incorporating women in everyday
domestic spaces, as well as films exploring patriarchy within the family, queerness and
disability, and working women, became more popular in the 1990s and early 2000s. The efforts
of South Korean women filmmakers to transmute and challenge official national masculinist
35 The parameters of women’s film have remained heavily debated in transnational contexts, from the debates
surrounding whether women’s film indicates films by women or films about women, whether women’s film is
defined by a “prefeminist ‘essence’ (the cinema that reflects women’s sensibilities), feminist activism (the cinema
women make by and for themselves), or postfeminist consumption (the market for chick flicks)” (White 2015, 9).
For the purpose of my analysis, I adhere to the dominant colloquial and critical definition of women’s film in South
Korea as film that incorporates feminist critique, practice, and/or activism as Kim Soyoung (1998) and Lee Seungmin (2021) have noted.
36 Seung-min Lee. “Feminist Documentary Films I: The Flow of Criticism-Production-Practice,” Docking
Magazine, September 21, 2021,
http://www.dockingmagazine.com/contents/20/167/?bk=menu&cc=&ci=&stype=&stext=+이승민&npg=1

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histories with women’s stories over the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s through the affective truth of
women’s lived experiences – what Youngmin Choe has called “affective historiography” (2015,
314) – are still relevant in the contemporary moment in which the discussion of feminism in film
is becoming livelier with the prevalence of online feminism and the #MeToo Movement.
Jeong Jae-eun and Kim Bora are part of the continuing movement of South Korean
women’s film (yŏsŏng yŏnghwa) as their films politicize girls’ and young women’s personal
experiences by straying from heteropatriarchal, ethnonational formulations of collective
belonging. Jeong’s earlier films Girls’ Night Out (Turŭi pam, 1999) and Yujin’s Secret Codes
(Tohyŏngilgi, 1999) all grapple with girls’ everyday experiences in proximity to crisis. Since the
beginning of her career, Jeong has privileged young female subjects who are not interested in
being obedient, good, or respectable. Many of her films feature girls and women who wander
through space in errant trajectories. Like Jeong’s films, Kim Bora’s earlier short films such as
The Girl with Red Shoes (2003) often feature outcasts of society who are not wealthy, happy, or
married. Jeong and Kim’s investment in subjects that stray from heteropatriarchal notions of
collective belonging such as the nuclear family and ethnonational Korean identity – and how
these feminine figures are moved physically and emotionally in their straying – position them as
vital interlocutors of how a feminist and queer politics of errantry shapes the continuing
iterations of South Korean women’s film.
This chapter argues that visual representations of wandering and straying in Jeong Jaeeun and Kim Bora’s films generate modes of being emotionally moved in proximity to feminist
and queer critical sensibilities, inspired by queer methods of reading askew that illuminate what
tiny particulars and odd entry points into objects open up for us (Tongson 2021). My engagement
with errantry is indebted to Édouard Glissant’s postcolonial meditations on errantry in Poetics of

77
Relation (1990), in which Glissant argues that errantry “is not apolitical nor is it inconsistent
with the will to identity, which is, after all, nothing other than the search for a freedom within
particular surroundings” (20). Glissant proposes that errantry challenges and discards the
universal which he defines as a “generalizing edict that summarized the world as something
obvious and transparent…” (20). While Glissant writes in a Francophone Caribbean context with
attention to language and creolization, his attention to errantry as a postcolonial process of
straying from a supposedly transparent origin or root is useful in thinking through the consistent
straying from the nuclear family and ethnonational identity in Take Care of My Cat and House of
Hummingbird. Both films move away from “the totalitarian drive of a single, unique root” and
move towards “a fundamental relationship with the Other” (Glissant 1990, 14) through their
representations of emergent solidarities between girls and women in the face of disidentification
with the roles they are expected to play. Glissant’s definition of errantry as political and
inextricable from the will, as well as one’s search for freedom, provides a foundation for my own
feminist exploration of errantry in these films. The willfulness of errantry evokes Sara Ahmed’s
discussion of the willful, errant subject often construed as young and female in her feminist study
of willfulness in Willful Subjects (2014). In the following sections, I map out my own
theorization of errantry in relation to Take Care of My Cat and House of Hummingbird, broadly
inspired by the above postcolonial and feminist theories.
Take Care of My Cat and House of Hummingbird grapple with the condition of
wandering and straying, of being or feeling lost, through protagonists who struggle to belong in
the collectives they are supposed to belong to. In this chapter, I think through errantry as a
feminist and queer practice and process of wandering and straying from centers of normative
social participation such as the school, the family, and the workplace. These acts of wandering

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and straying are inextricable from emotional upheaval, especially since straying from normative
social participation threatens punishment, promises freedom, and lingers at unresolved
ambivalence about one’s situation. While errantry by no means gestures towards a universal
experience or a universally applicable feminist critique, it does gesture towards a potential
commons of feminist solidarity that is queer in its undoing of “dominant modes of relatedness”
(Reddy 2021, 177) and in its formulation of alternative modes of belonging apart from the
heteronormative nuclear family, a key tool in South Korea’s postcolonial nation building.
Errantry renders emergent the possibility of a space of kinship and intimacy that is not bound to
blood relations or the state. Both films contain some moments of errantry, however, that are
suffused with cathartic emotions such as elation, and these moments contribute to the defiant
playfulness exhibited in the films. Therefore, errantry exists in both cathartic and non-cathartic
moments of play and non-play. Errantry is vital to the visual poetics of both films, since Take
Care of My Cat is held together through the protagonists’ wandering movements in urban spaces
of Incheon and Seoul and House of Hummingbird showcases the dance club, the trampoline, the
karaoke room, and the alleyway as places the protagonist strays towards away from home and
school.
Errantry’s manifestations in Take Care of My Cat and House of Hummingbird perform
critiques of feminized affective scripts that prompt the protagonists to wander or stray and
facilitates testimony not only in the world of these films but also in the feminist communities
formed around these films. Here I refer to testimony as an everyday process of “watching,
observing, hearing, internalizing, or otherwise sensing and embodying the different violences,
pains, and desires” constructed in locales of intimacy such as the family (Tagore 2009, 5).
Testimony is happening all the time in these films, regardless of whether there is a formal

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audience. Rather than limit the definition of testimony to an authentic narrative act told by a
witness who is moved to narrate the urgency of war, oppression, or revolution, I look to the
possibility of testimony as both verbal and nonverbal, denouncing a past or present situation,
questioning official history, and reimagining resistance by challenging “any easy distinctions
between ‘extreme’ situations of violence and the systemic or everyday forms of violence”
(Tagore 2009, 4). Visual representations of errantry in Take Care of My Cat and House of
Hummingbird act as a testimonial repossession of girls’ and women’s life stories by
documenting the moments in which subjects stray from the tacit rules of gendered comportment
expected within the heteropatriarchal family, school, and workplace.
Take Care of My Cat and House of Hummingbird capture the unruly movements of girls’
and women’s emotions concentrated in sites of everyday mundanity and crisis, moving through
sites such as the small, stuffy dining room in the apartment of a working-class family aspiring
towards social mobility, to the cramped alleyways behind a dance club conducive to queer
desire, to the concrete docks of a port by the roaring sea, to the imposing sterility of the visitation
room in a juvenile detention center. Through the visual poetics of errantry, Jeong Jae-eun and
Kim Bora address how to read – and how to feel – a national era in which economic uncertainty
led to hypermasculine ethics and the feminization of poverty. Take Care of My Cat and House of
Hummingbird emphasize “affective economies” (Ahmed 2004) by suggesting that emotions
align individuals with communities through the very intensity of attachments and that emotions
are mediators in the relationship between the individual and the collective. Emotions are neither
stagnant nor contained in their existence, as they “bind subjects together” (Ahmed 2004, 119). In
other words, emotions cannot be relegated to an inherently feminine interior. Such an
understanding of emotions, pioneered by feminist scholars such as Sara Ahmed and Teresa

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Brennan, is deeply invested in movement. Emotions move between people, and ultimately
transform the environment in which people live. The following textual analysis focuses on both
films’ attention to a feminist politics of being moved and thus potentially transformed.
Wandering, Play, and Precarity in Take Care of My Cat (2001)
Take Care of My Cat, directed by Jeong Jae-eun, follows twenty-year-old women through
introspective and mundane moments against a post-financial crisis background “in which
hypermasculine ethics seek to resolve national anxieties by recuperating male agency at a time of
economic uncertainty” (Shin 2005, 119). Upon its release in 2001, Take Care of My Cat was far
from a blockbuster. The film garnered only 35,000 admissions compared to Friend (Ch’in’gu,
2001) directed by Kwak Kyung-taek which became the highest grossing film in South Korea as
of 2001 with a new record of 8.2 million views. Friend was marketed as a jop’ok or gangster
film that featured “male bonding in the face of adversity as the ultimate virtue of masculinity,
often offering a concoction of action, violence, melodrama and humor” (Shin 2005, 118). Take
Care of My Cat, on the other hand, was marketed as a “stylish but realistic portrayal of today’s
twenty-year-olds” featuring protagonists who were described as “cat-like twenty-year-olds”
(119). The film was shown in various film festivals as well as on the art-house circuit in South
Korea and overseas, developing a feminist cult following. Hailing from the port city of Incheon,
the five women of Take Care of My Cat are constantly on the move, roaming the streets alone or
together, catching the bus or train, going to and from work, or as in the opening scene,
chaotically running together along the sea. The film alternates between the urban backdrops of
Incheon and Seoul. While Incheon is an old port city that was the first in Korean history to open
its doors to foreign cultures, Seoul is sleeker and visually more modern in comparison. Through

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the camera’s gaze, Jeong fixates on the rundown apartments of Incheon, juxtaposing them with
the towering skyscrapers of Seoul.
Take Care of My Cat has been received as a film that has mirrored and affirmed the
errantry experienced by South Korean women in their day to day lives in the 1990s and early
2000s. For example, in an essay titled “The Consolation of Saying I Believe You” (“Nanŭn nŏrŭl
minnŭndanŭn mari chun wiro,” 2021), feminist filmmaker Kangyu Ga-ram elaborates on the
significance of Take Care of My Cat to her own creative and personal journey as a woman artist.
Kangyu’s films explore feminist and queer voices in contemporary South Korea. Her oeuvre
includes the recent documentary film #AfterMeToo (2022) on the dissident movements following
the #MeToo Movement in South Korea, as well as the documentary film Itaewon (2019) which
explores Seoul’s Itaewon neighborhood through the lives of three women who have lived there
since the 1970s. It is no coincidence that the special twentieth anniversary archive edition of
Take Care of My Cat’s screenplay is accompanied by many essays written from a rich array of
feminist and queer perspectives that demonstrate the film’s impact felt on a political, thus
personal, level. In an interview for the special edition, the director Jeong Jae-eun has reflected on
the film’s continuing feminist significance, noting that she has noticed women viewers are
“feeling” the characters more deeply than ever before since South Korean women’s
consciousness has changed so much in the past twenty years. Jeong expresses that she feels she
has finally met a true audience, alluding to the feminist consciousness of her viewers which is
part of a larger change in “the way women see their own narratives” (2021, 261).
According to Kangyu, Take Care of My Cat was a film to relate to in a cinematic world
dominated by men. Kangyu frames Take Care of My Cat as a sort of everywoman’s film, a film
that contained moments of what every South Korean woman in her early twenties has felt or

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lived through. The film for Kangyu was unprecedented because it spoke to her own life as a
young woman artist who was “constantly anxious, full of complicated feelings, and wandering
about” (Kangyu uses the word panghwang to describe this act of wandering) (2021, 185).
Throughout the essay, Kangyu consistently uses words conveying feeling and emotion such as
neukkim and kamjŏng as she demonstrates how she felt connected to the protagonists as well as
the film. Errantry becomes a point of relation or connection for Kangyu as a viewer since she
experienced that same sense of wandering or going astray as the female protagonists of the film.
Kangyu describes her own errantry as proximate to the emotional conditions of friendship
between women, including “those times when I would complain as I held the phone in a mix of
jealousy and longing” (185). She describes the film as the first film that “embraced” and
“believed” her emotions (186). Kangyu’s essay emphasizes just how formative and revolutionary
Take Care of My Cat was at the time of its release for young female viewers who had struggled
to see themselves represented in South Korean cinema. The film not only performed an almost
documentary-like function of recording realistic scenes of the lives of young women in their
twenties, but also performed a public-forming function that supported communal feeling,
witnessing, and believing.
Through the protagonists’ navigation of the world around them – often bewildering and
inhospitable to not only their basic survival but also their desires and dreams – Take Care of My
Cat invites an involved viewer who may witness what these protagonists do to get by every day.
The late 1990s in South Korea following the 1997 IMF financial crisis, during which the film is
set, gave rise to Confucian revivalism which decried family breakdown, championed the
mythical extended Korean family, and relied on a patriarchal essential portrayal of Koreanness
(Abelmann 2003). The film follows five young women against this unnerving national backdrop,

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documenting their struggles to be financially independent. The camera is not only a participant in
the refusal to stay still exhibited by these protagonists, but also an assiduous witness that is
consistently in transit with these young women as they move to survive and find pleasure in their
uncertain world dictated by heteropatriarchy, poverty, and capitalism. By manipulating the
camera to capture and partake in movements of wandering and straying, Jeong Jae-eun creates a
dynamic portrait of twenty-year-old female youth that complicates an ethnonational
understanding of Koreanness, challenges gendered structures of kinship such as the nuclear
family, and critiques the feminization of poverty endemic to contemporary South Korea.
Take Care of My Cat formulates a visual poetics of navigating space, place, and the
pursuit of happiness that could be characterized as feline if the three well-known passions of cats
are small spaces, dark places, and the chase (Miyao 2019, 5). Indeed, Jeong Jae-eun has
mentioned in interviews that she had meant for her five protagonists “to be like cats – flexible,
independent, complex, to have the tendency to leave if they are not happy with their owner”
(2022, 28). Throughout Take Care of My Cat, the camera follows how the five protagonists
move through space in the urban landscapes of Incheon and Seoul, recording the five friends’
frenetic movements towards or away from each other. These movements are both physical and
emotional, as the friends move together and apart physically and emotionally. Much of the film’s
visual focus is on moments of transit facilitated by trains and buses. The film is also densely
populated with street scenes that focus on cramped, winding alleyways. The visual focus on such
urban spaces creates a sensibility of constantly being in transit, consistently moving towards or
away from something. The film’s public urban landscapes are imbued with the personal. As the
camera follows the five young women moving through these public spaces, the viewer is also
forced to confront the personal crises each of them is grappling with. These crises include Ji-

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young’s struggle to find a job to support herself and her grandparents, Tae-hee’s struggle to find
her life’s purpose, Hye-ju’s struggle to find fulfillment in a dull office job, and Ohn-jo and Biryu’s struggle to make a living on their own away from their estranged family.
Only five minutes into the film, the camera discloses to the audience what Tae-hee, Hyeju, Ji-young, Ohn-jo, and Bi-ryu do for a living, suggesting that self-sustenance through work is
a point of critique in the film. Tae-hee works without pay for her family’s bathhouse and
volunteers her time to work as a typist for a poet with cerebral palsy. Hye-ju works in a big
office in Seoul, running errands such as making coffee and printing documents for higher-ups. Jiyoung struggles to find work after leaving her job at a failing factory that refuses to pay her.
Ohn-jo and Bi-ryu live on their own in Incheon’s Chinatown, selling their handmade jewelry on
the streets. Tae-hee, Hye-ju, Ji-young, Ohn-jo, and Bi-ryu wander and stray from the neoliberal
demand to be good at self-management (“good” connoting wealthy, married, and able to
creatively customize one’s life), a tacit rule of newly democratized South Korea (Song 2015). By
showing how these women’s emotional orientations towards surviving their precarious living
conditions shift, most notably through Tae-hee and Ji-young’s decision to leave the country, the
film hints at the possibility of transmuting the demands of self-management on one’s own terms.
Take Care of My Cat begins in motion. The camera shakily follows the five friends in
high school uniforms who raucously dance and run alongside each other at a harbor in Incheon.
The girls walk towards the camera, and though at first some are paired off, the next few seconds
show the girls shouting, laughing, and bumping into each other deliberately, as if to form one
large, unruly organism. Continuing the shaky mid shot from the opening scene, the camera
follows the women as they run towards the water amidst concrete, taking on the perspective of a
participant running to catch up with them in the boisterous chaos (see fig. I.1). The camera then

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abruptly cuts to a shot of their identical skirts and shoes from the waist down as the five friends
begin to sing an old Korean song “Good Night Comrade” in rhythm to their playful synchronized
footwork over the rope lying on the concrete. As the five friends jump rope, they sing these
lyrics: “Walking over our fallen friends, march forward, march forward! Farewell Nakdong
River, we’re marching forward!” The loud tone in which they sing is undisciplined and
exhilarating. “Good Night Comrade,” originally sung by Hyeon In and released in the early
1950s, is a song mourning the death of a comrade during the Korean War from the perspective of
a soldier. The song was not only a popular nationalist anthem in South Korea but also a song that
girls used to jump rope. Thus, the narrative signifiers of national belonging identifiable in the
song – shared experience of war, collective mourning, love for one’s country, reification of
military men – are obscured and transformed through girls’ and women’s playful errantry.
The camera follows the girls’ frenetic marching, jumping, and arm waving, immersed in
the chaotic experience of play which seems most in proximity with the emotion of elation.
Caught in the movements of flying hair, flailing limbs, and open mouths, the camera (and the

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viewer’s perspective in relation to the scene) becomes inextricable from these movements (see
fig. I.2). The sea, a strip of blue amidst the industrial landscape, serves as the backdrop of the
girls’ revelry. The use of a nationalistic military song to start the film at a harbor in the
multicultural port city of Incheon suggests a questioning of the boundaries and limits of Korean
ethnonational identity. The multilingual, multiethnic landscape of Incheon consistently disrupts
Koreanness as a stable identity, rendering ethnonational identity as a wandering, errant signifier.
Take Care of My Cat performs errantry from Koreanness through its persistent evocation of the
instability of a cohesive ethnic identity, sonically through Incheon’s multilingual inhabitants and
narratively through Tae-hee and Ji-young’s refusal to stay in South Korea.
I.2 Part of the group laughing and in motion (Tae-hee on the left).
After singing, marching, and dancing together in continually moving irregular lines and
circles, the young women’s spontaneous routine dissolves into wild laughter and what looks like
intentional erratic movements towards one another which results in their bodies crashing into
each other only to pull apart again. The friends’ elated moments at the Incheon harbor culminate

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in Tae-hee (Bae Doona)’s attempt at photographing her four friends Ji-young (Ok Go-woon),
Hye-ju (Lee Yo-won), Ohn-jo (Lee Eun-ju), and Bi-ryu (Lee Eun-sil). When Tae-hee yells,
“Let’s take pictures!” her friends scream delightedly in assent and move together, Hye-ju and
Ohn-jo flashing the peace sign, Ji-young slinging her arm around Hye-ju, and Bi-ryu framing her
own face by holding a hand flat beneath her chin. Their poses are casual, even comical. Perhaps
more importantly, these poses are not held still. The director’s camera is aligned with Tae-hee’s
digital camera, hovering just behind Tae-hee’s right ear in a medium shot as she strives to
capture her friends’ images. When Tae-hee interrupts the posing to usher her friends to a better
spot, the camera moves with the young women, losing Tae-hee for a moment then returning to
the spot just behind her. Just as Tae-hee’s digital camera is consistently on the move for the
perfect picture, the film’s camera in these scenes is on the move, hovering and shaking, moving
up and down, from side to side. When Tae-hee finally counts down to take the picture, Ohn-jo
and Bi-ryu jump to the side to collide into Hye-ju and Ji-young, which elicits laughter and
screams. No one is upset that the shot has been spoiled. The friends’ unbridled movements are
framed by the sea, also continually on the move, behind them (see fig. I.3).
I.3 Ohn-jo and Bi-ryu spoil the camera shot.

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The film camera’s attempt to capture the image of Tae-hee trying to capture a still of her
friends is thwarted by the elements as well as the ceaseless movement of each human figure. The
attempt to capture her frenetic friends in a still picture is near impossible for Tae-hee. The wind
plays a role as well, blowing the young women’s hair this way and that. In these moments, one
can read a double refusal to stay still. The film conducts a doubly layered performance of
movement that refuses order, discipline, and even function (the function of posing and/or taking
a picture). As the sounds of the wind, water, and seagulls combine with laughter and screams, the
production of a perfect photograph is thwarted, failed. What is produced is closer to an energetic,
emotional state that gives way to a process of construction, destruction, and repair that
incorporates the release of tension, voluntary movement across boundaries, and exposure to the
unexpected which makes transformation possible (Henricks 2015, 8).
Most importantly, the play initiated at the beginning of the film postulates a distinctive
pattern of engagement with the world of the film that brings the five friends together despite their
many differences and disagreements at a commons of emotional ambivalence that vacillates
between elation (elation of pleasure on one’s own terms) and fear (fear of failing to survive). The
women vacillate between the desire for happiness on their own terms and happiness according to
the punishing pace of an increasingly neoliberal society which demands individual customization
of one’s life to ensure one’s survival. These women – young and single, unable to provide a
regular employment record – are jeopardized as the new poor of newly democratic South Korea
as young unmarried women during that time were excluded from programs such as loan
applications (Song 2014, 60). The protagonists of Take Care of My Cat are trapped by the rapid
rise in the cost of public goods and services such as tuition and the resurgent conservative gender
regime that endorsed gender discrimination in the job market (Song 2015, 1). The playful

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errantry of the port scene becomes a means of negotiating and reconfiguring this state of
precarious entrapment.
The juxtaposition of scenes of elation with scenes of fearful precarity throughout Take
Care of My Cat comprise a grammar of emotional ambivalence that is essential to the feminist
sensibility of the film. This scenic juxtaposition, which is also present in House of Hummingbird,
generates contrasts in physical movements as well as emotional orientations. For example, the
unbridled, elated movements of the five friends in the first scene of Take Care of My Cat are
juxtaposed with the inert, oppressive uniformity of the scene following the opening scene in
which the screen transitions to an unmoving long shot of a white apartment building that looks
gray in the still-dark light of dawn. The camera is trained on two windows: larger windows
attached to an apartment’s balcony on the right and a much smaller window to the left above the
building’s staircase (see fig I.4). A man and woman’s raised voices crescendo as an object goes
flying out the apartment window, shattering glass. Just as the window breaks, a shadowy figure
passes by the smaller window, traversing down the stairs. The camera moves to the entrance,
transitioning to a high angle shot that captures Hye-ju exiting the building and briskly making
her way through the slushy parking lot (see fig. I.5). Contemplative music plays as the camera
follows her movements; the camera stops at the top of shallow stairs that Hye-ju climbs. As she
comes face to face with the camera, she angles her body away to keep walking, and the camera
then trains on her receding figure. She slows down for a moment, staring at a car with bashed-in
windows, then resumes walking. As Hye-ju’s figure becomes smaller, the scene cuts to a low
angle close-up shot of stairs at a subway station, following Hye-ju’s steps to the subway exit (see
fig. I.6).

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The continuing non-diegetic music bridges the bleak domestic scenery with a bustling
site of public transportation. The music also juxtaposes Hye-ju’s oppressive home with her
trajectory of movement away from the harsh straight lines of her apartment where she began her
journey. A high angle long shot of the subway cars, which shows the wires they are moving on,
serves as the backdrop of the opening credits as the music continues. Industrial lines of
movement – highways, trains, cars, metal rods supporting signs – are filmed using increasingly
higher angles (see fig. I.7). The contrast between the inertia of the apartment building (rendered
fearful and precarious due to the specter of domestic violence) and the bustling lines of public
transportation calls to attention the persistent potential of moving away from conditions of living
that feel oppressive. Although this potential cannot be glorified as liberatory and often falls short
of transformational, it poses the possibility of choosing and even changing one’s trajectory.

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I.4 – I.7 Transitions from Hye-ju’s apartment in Incheon to the industrial landscape.

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While place is important in the film, nation is positioned as a fragile construct that is
undermined by the errantry of these protagonists’ trajectories away from Korean ethnonational
identity, primarily through language. For example, the twins Ohn-jo and Bi-ryu speak in both
Korean and Mandarin, selling their handmade accessories on the streets of Incheon to support
themselves. As they attempt to sell their wares to the young children of the neighborhood, they
speak in Korean to the children while the children respond in both Korean and Mandarin.
Similarly, Ohn-jo and Bi-ryu respond in Korean when their grandparents speak to them in
Mandarin over the apartment intercom when they attempt to drop off a package from their
estranged mother who lives in Japan. It is implied that the children all have diasporic Sinophone
backgrounds, and Ohn-jo and Bi-ryu are part of this diasporic community, as their grandparents
reside in Incheon’s Chinatown. Local places such as the Incheon Coastal Passenger Terminal
where Tae-hee and Ji-young hand out flyers advertising Tae-hee’s family’s bathhouse is an
example of a place that captures the frenetic collision of multiple languages and cultures. When
filming the terminal, the camera shakes in small increments, capturing baggage falling over,
picking up fragments of some non-Korean languages, people gesticulating, shouting at each
other, and yelling into phones, and ground-level shots of rapidly moving feet (see fig. I.8). As
they exit the terminal, Tae-hee tells Ji-young: “I wonder where all those people are coming from
and where they’re going.” Coming and going, rather than claiming a place of origin, becomes an
overarching theme of the film.

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I.8 Ground-level shots of moving feet at the terminal.
Jeong Jae-eun’s cinematic exploration of intimacies in young women’s everyday lives in
late 1990s South Korea prompts us to question how attachments between women can reinforce
the reality of another’s experience in a patriarchal society that seeks to control female youth. The
issue of being believed and claiming one’s lived experiences as real or legitimate are central
issues in Take Care of My Cat, House of Hummingbird, and the other texts in this dissertation’s
archive. We can observe how errantry and testimony collide when Ji-young is incarcerated in the
juvenile detention center because she refuses to speak to the police officer who interrogates her
about the circumstances of her grandparents’ sudden deaths. The deaths deprive Ji-young of not
only her family and home, but also her economic possessions and blood relations, the two
grounds upon which contemporary South Korean society determines identity (Kim 2015, 160).
The officer reads Ji-young’s silence as insolence, assumes that she is glad her grandparents died
after the roof of their home collapses, and calls her “yellow hair” to connote her deviance as a
young person with dyed hair. As she is admitted into the detention center, Ji-young continues her
silence as if in protest. Across the glass of the visiting room that separates the two friends, Tae-

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hee tells Ji-young: “Even if you had hacked someone to death with an ax, I’d be on your side. I
think you’re doing this because there’s a reason. I believe you.” By “this,” Tae-hee refers to Jiyoung’s silence. It is Tae-hee’s statement that moves Ji-young to speak for the first time after her
grandparents’ deaths. Ji-young responds, “Even if I get out, there’s nowhere to go.”
Through various shots in Tae-hee’s visitation sequence, the camera positions the viewer
as a witness lingering behind Tae-hee, staring alternately into Ji-young’s exhausted face and Taehee’s quietly determined face. Although these shots are not point of view shots, they are close-up
shots that intimately capture the facial expressions and affects of despair and sympathy of the
friends’ exchange (see figs. I.9-I.10). The shots Jeong employs in this scene capture what the
police officer could not, or refused to, perceive earlier in the film before Ji-young was
incarcerated: the unbearable weight of Ji-young’s despair which manifests in silence after her
grandparents’ death compounded with the state of being homeless. What the formal procedure of
state interrogation cannot understand is understood in a testimonial encounter of friendship. In
the film, there are no formal procedures to ensure justice for Ji-young. However, throughout the
brief exchange in the visiting room, another reality is created – a reality in which one can be
believed even if one does not have money, legal protection, or a conventional family. In other
words, a reality is created in which one can be believed despite of, or even because of, one’s
errantry. Credibility’s standards are found not in one’s proximity to blood relations or economic
possessions, but in one’s proximity to friendship, or in this case another person who is similarly
errant.

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I.9 – I.10 Tae-hee and Ji-young gaze at each other across the glass in the visiting room.
In Take Care of My Cat, errantry can be read as a collection of movements and
orientations – physical and emotional – that arise from the five protagonists’ conditions of being
limited by the demands of normative, patriarchal social participation. These limitations are often
unspoken and latent, shaping the social cultures of obligation these women navigate – the
obligation to work, to be financially successful, to be part of a family unit. Errantry is disruptive
because errant subjects refuse to move in service of these limitations. They generate their own
logics of belonging, play, and social participation. However, such a propensity for the

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destabilization of the demands of capitalism and the nuclear family does not mean that all
expressions of errantry carve out a utopic space in which structures of power are suddenly
suspended. Through their missed calls, fragmented text messages, and wandering movements
through Incheon and Seoul, the protagonists of Take Care of My Cat move against the skin of
each other’s differences, each emotionally and physically moved by the living conditions of a
neoliberal South Korea defined by the feminization of precarious job markets compounded by
the regulation of unmarried women’s sexuality by the nuclear family (Jesook Song 2014, 2, 7).
Reading Errant Girlhood in House of Hummingbird (2018)
House of Hummingbird (2018), written and directed by Kim Bora, reckons with themes
of teenage rebellion, the violence of the nuclear family, queer desire, and the bonds between girls
and women through one fourteen-year-old schoolgirl’s coming-of-age during the year 1994 in
South Korea. These themes are rendered against the fraught backdrop of South Korea in
transition during the newly democratic 1990s, a temporality defined by “multiple and
overlapping ‘post-ness’ that encompasses both the residual and the emergent: post-student
movement, post-authoritarian” (Lee 2019, 286). The intimate details of gendered postcolonial
life, primarily refracted through the heteronormative nuclear family, serve as the backdrop for
the major disaster in the film – the 1994 collapse of the Seongsu Bridge. The bridge’s collapse
resulted from the toll that the rapid industrialization of the previous decades had on the 1990s,
cemented as a traumatic event in South Korean citizens’ memories, a disaster the director has
discussed in comparison to the sinking of the Sewol ferry in 2014. By incorporating the collapse
of the Seongsu Bridge, the film grapples with how state violence through negligence can affect
the texture of everyday life. Kim has expressed that the social atmosphere of the 1990s – the

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pervasive sense of literal and social collapse in the wake of South Korea’s rapid modernization
borne from the postcolonial desire to be globally recognized as a developed country – continues
to exist in contemporary South Korean society, thus making her film relatable to contemporary
audiences.
House of Hummingbird is set in the Daechi-dong neighborhood of Seoul and follows
Eun-hee, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl from a working-class background who struggles with an
unhappy home life which includes a physically abusive older brother, an absent older sister, and
emotionally distant parents. The children regularly help the parents with their rice cake business
in the odd hours of the morning, which explains why Eun-hee often falls asleep during class at
school. Excelling in the education system in Seoul’s Daechi-dong neighborhood becomes a
fantasy of amassing capital and “making something of '' the grueling routines of work and
survival. The fantasy of upward mobility afforded by academic excellence can be characterized
as cruel optimism (Berlant 2011), or when an object that draws attachment actively impedes the
aim that brought one to it initially. The hyper-competitive school system compounded with
domestic violence make flourishing and even surviving difficult for Eun-hee. Struggling with
first loves, friendship, family, and health, Eun-hee finds solace in her new classical Chinese tutor
Young-ji who is implied to be a labor activist in hiding. The film concludes with the collapse of
the Seongsu Bridge, which kills Young-ji and would have killed Eun-hee’s sister as well, had she
not been late for her bus. Although the ending does not provide a resolution to the crises of the
film, Eun-hee is able to connect with her family for the first time and feel more at peace with
who she is becoming.
Like Take Care of My Cat, House of Hummingbird generated a feminist community akin
to what Kim Soyoung has called “alternative public spheres” that came into being in the wake of

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feminist and queer film festivals in the 1990s and early 2000s (2005, 80). The film premiered at
the Busan International Film Festival in 2018 as a festival favorite that won many awards, most
notably the Grand Prix of the Generation at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival.
Domestically, House of Hummingbird garnered a loyal following of feminist viewers who
positioned the film as a feminist film. The film’s reception as a feminist work is inextricable
from the interactive dynamics between feminist creators and their audiences, what Hye-ryoung
Lee has called a “queer-timed participatory model” (2021, 219), in the larger renaissance of
feminist arts since the 2010s in South Korea that been referred to colloquially and in
contemporary criticism as a “feminism reboot.” A special volume titled 1994, the record that
does not close: Hummingbird (1994nyŏn, tach'iji anŭn kiŏk ŭi kirok pŏlsae, 2019) published
shortly after the film’s release, including the original screenplay, essays by writers and critics,
and an interview featuring Kim Bora and Alison Bechdel, evidences the sustained attention to
House of Hummingbird as a feminist text. This volume includes an essay by the novelist Choe
Eun-young titled “To All the Eun-hees of That Time” (Kŭttaeŭi ŭnhŭidŭrege, 2019) which
reexamines the decade of the 1990s through Choe’s autotheoretical retrospectives of her
emotional coming into feminist consciousness.
In her essay, Choe recalls the demands of affective comportment that were placed upon
her as a girl, including the demands to “be nice,” and not become a “delinquent” (209), not
unlike what the protagonist Eun-hee experiences in House of Hummingbird. Choe remembers
how the boys around her were never pressured by adults to be nice, and how when boys would
snap her bra straps in school or lift her skirts they would be condoned because they were just
“boys being boys” (209). Choe reflects that the niceness demanded of her and other girls of her
generation was in fact passivity – the demand to passively accept when someone treats one

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badly. Another mode of relation to the film for Choe is through the figures of ordinary women,
women who gave up their chance at education to work to raise money for their male siblings,
women who work alongside their husbands who must also take responsibility for unwaged
domestic labor and childcare, women who live in abusive family situations, women who have
lost the ability to laugh and relate to the people closest to them (211). Choe concludes her
reflection on the film by wondering just how many Korean girls have been praised for being
“true to your emotions” (209), identifying the expression of emotion as a key problematic in the
film. House of Hummingbird’s focus on the ordinary through the everyday lives of women
mirrors how Take Care of My Cat approaches gender. In addition, Choe’s feminist meditation on
House of Hummingbird mirrors Kangyu’s essay on Take Care of My Cat in its autotheoretical
approach to feminist critique.
The seemingly minute particulars of Eun-hee’s everyday life in House of Hummingbird
illuminate how the ordinary can become a contact zone of power (Kathleen Stewart 2007) in
which personal and national crisis converge, inextricable from each other. I attend to what is
emotionally communicated, witnessed, and challenged in scenes of Eun-hee’s everyday life that
gesture towards the queer possibilities of choosing how to relate to oneself and others. I argue
that visual representations of errantry in House of Hummingbird – dancing in the club, jumping
on a trampoline, and wandering in alleyways – gesture towards alternative trajectories that queer
gendered expectations of passivity and dependence, especially through the camera’s
juxtaposition of domestic and non-domestic spaces. Errant details in the film rewrite South
Korea’s 1990s from the perspective of girlhood that feels askew from demands of
heteronormativity and neoliberalism.

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I.11 Eun-hee and her classmates repeat after their teacher.
House of Hummingbird suggests that Eun-hee’s errant actions and movements contribute
to her so-called delinquency, unjustly decided by authority figures that dominate the lives of
young people in the film such as parents and teachers. For example, Eun-hee’s teacher, the same
one that separated the students into their homerooms with a stick, delivers a didactic speech on
education as a means to better one’s future. The camera shows the teacher behind a podium
aggressively preaching to a room full of students, rows of girls with chin-length bobs shot from
the back, faces invisible. After delivering the platitude “How you make use of today determines
the rest of your future,” the teacher proceeds to hand out slips of paper to the students,
demanding they each identify two delinquents among their fellow classmates. The camera
follows the teacher’s movements at waist-level, catching the seated students’ silent facial
expressions of fear and annoyance; the camera witnesses and captures the unspoken depressive
currents of critique from the schoolgirls. The teacher shouts, “Those who smoke, those who date
instead of studying, those who go to karaoke, are all delinquents.” Upon his return to the podium,
he pumps a fist in the air as if he is at a protest, shouting a slogan he forces the students to repeat
three times, each round louder than the last: “Instead of karaoke, I will go to Seoul National

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University.” The teacher’s voice continues to assert itself outside of the frame like a bad dream
as the camera captures students’ blank faces including Eun-hee’s which borders on misery (see
fig. I.11).
I.12 Eun-hee and Ji-sook jump on a trampoline.
The above scene cuts directly to Eun-hee and her best friend Ji-sook jumping on a
trampoline in a peaceful yard filled with messy greenery (see fig. I.12). The camera first catches
the two friends from a bird's eye view angle as they laugh giddily beneath the afternoon sun.
Eun-hee swears freely and insults her homeroom teacher, and Ji-sook offers up her own
affirmation. The camera moves closer to catch the girls’ errant motions, how at times they are
suspended in the air as if in flight. The trampoline in the nameless yard enables action and
communication that is not beholden to productivity in the sense of capitalist accumulation or
neoliberal self-management which seep into the very fabric of the neighborhood’s everyday life,
evidenced through scenes such as Eun-hee’s family counting bills from the rice cake shop and
Eun-hee’s grueling tutoring schedule. The trampoline allows for play, uninhibited speech, and
friendship that do not provide lucrative gains for the actors involved; rather, the trampoline

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becomes a place of truth-telling and pleasure for two girls who are rendered invisible in other
realms of sociality such as the school and the home. One could even say that the trampoline is a
place where Eun-hee and Ji-sook may embody orientations and attitudes errant from what is
expected from them at school and at home.
Scenes that take place in school or in the apartment, scenes coded with emotions of
shame, fear, guilt, and anger, are placed in direct juxtaposition with scenes suffused with various
displays of errant play. These affective and visual juxtapositions, facilitated by abrupt cuts
between scenes of oppressive domesticity to scenes of wild play, perform a critique of stifling
patriarchal kinship throughout the film. There are two other moments in the film that cut directly
from a school or apartment scene to a location where Eun-hee may move her body freely and
focus on doing what she herself enjoys. These activities stray from what is accepted as good or
responsible for a schoolgirl according to Eun-hee’s homeroom teacher: going to karaoke,
loitering in an alleyway, jumping on a trampoline, and dancing at the club. A close-up of Eunhee’s mother’s frayed stocking, coming apart at the heel, cuts to a scene of Eun-hee and Ji-sook
climbing down a flight of stairs to enter a thumping dance club with flashing lights (see figs. I.13
– I.14). At the dance club, Eun-hee, in baggy denim and a boxy t-shirt, is far from the silent girl
in a plaid skirt and white blouse the viewer is used to as she screams ecstatically and dances
wildly to the music (see fig. I.15). Eun-hee’s straying physically from home to the forbidden
social space of the dance club parallels her straying from the implicit demand of heterosexuality
as she loiters in the alleyway next to the dance club with her new romantic interest Yu-ri. Later
in the film, a close-up of a lamp broken during a fight between Eun-hee’s parents cuts to another
scene of Eun-hee jumping on a trampoline. Errant details such as the frayed stocking and the
broken lamp are inseparable from forbidden spaces of sociality such as the dance club or the

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karaoke room. These details connect spaces conventionally coded as public to those coded as
private, blurring the boundaries between the social and the domestic.
I.13 – I.15 A closeup of frayed stockings cuts to the entrance of the dance club. Eun-hee and Jisook dance at the club.

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In “Rewriting as (Independent) Woman between Fiction and Documentary,” a feminist
reading of House of Hummingbird with attention to women’s authorship, Nara Lee elaborates
upon the movement among contemporary South Korean women filmmakers to use personal
experiences as touchstones in their practice. Lee notes that the director Kim Bora has
emphasized that she kept in mind “the most personal is the most political” as she developed the
film.37 Lee characterizes Kim’s directing of the film as a kind of “writing with the camera,” a
writing that documents through fiction, enabling the director to “crookedly write oneself into the
film.”38 Indeed, Kim Bora has emphasized in a recent director’s talk with The Korea Society that
the film is partially based on her own autobiographical experiences growing up in the
competitive neighborhood of Daechi-dong in Seoul.39 In Kim’s crooked integration of her own
personal experiences into the fictional narrative of the film, one can read an errant impulse that
reformulates historical memory through a queer feminist perspective attentive to digressions and
peculiar pathways (Tongson 2021).
National history is rewritten through the personal history of the girl in House of
Hummingbird. Family crisis is placed in direct relation to national crisis, or the consequences of
developmentalist authoritarianism which led to the collapse of major structures in the 1990s such
as the Seongsu Bridge. South Korea’s literal state of collapse in the 1990s, despite the advent of
national democracy, is placed in proximity to girlhood’s errant twists and turns. Errantry in the
film promises modes of relation based upon mutual pleasure which in turn challenge
universalizing scripts of gendered belonging to a collective. In Eun-hee’s case, these
universalizing scripts include patriarchal domestic relations of the nuclear family and the
37 Nara Lee. “P'iksyŏn'gwa tak'yument'ŏri saiesŏ (tongnip)yŏsŏngŭro tashi ssŭgi,” An’gwa bak no. 48 (2020), 182.
38 Ibid., 183, 188.
39 Kim Bora, “House of Hummingbird: A Director’s Talk.” Interview by Jay Oh. The Korea Society, January 24,
2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvk3-xPaGZI

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neoliberal demand for self-development. Eun-hee’s errantry or refusal to be circumscribed within
these universalizing scripts can be read as “the search for a freedom within particular
surroundings” (Glissant 1997, 20). Kim Bora writes with the camera by attending to fictional and
nonfictional accounts of ordinary feminine life, not unlike Jeong Jae-eun and other South Korean
feminist filmmakers such as Byeon Young-joo. To conclude my brief errant exploration of
House of Hummingbird, I propose that through visual repetitions of errant trajectories, feelings,
and details, the film creates pockets of feminist and queer potentiality that promise the search for
nectar on one’s own terms, no matter how precarious that search may be.
Conclusion: Errantry’s Emergent Politics of Willfulness and Friendship
This chapter has argued that Take Care of My Cat and House of Hummingbird can be
situated in a continuing feminist genealogy of South Korean women’s film through their
representations of errantry. Both films interrogate the condition of collapse signature to 1990s
South Korea resulting from a postcolonial nation’s rapid rise to modernity. This condition of
collapse permeates both films with sensibilities of dread, ruin, fear, and danger. Collapse is
deeply personal as well in these films, as each protagonist struggles with a sense of desperately
trying to support her own life, only to be confronted with the destructive precarity arising from
poverty and patriarchy. It is no coincidence that home and work are two main sites of feminist
inquiry in Take Care of My Cat and House of Hummingbird, as the gendered division of labor
crucial to South Korea’s postcolonial domestic landscape as well as mass mobilization of waged
and unwaged workers (Moon 2005) continually surface in South Korean women’s literature and
film. Jeong Jae-eun and Kim Bora demonstrate through their films how the lives of girls and

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women in a postcolonial, newly democratized South Korea reflect the gendered, classed
consequences of a postcolonial nation’s claim to advancement.
The girls and women in these films often seem mired in ambivalence, finding themselves
unable to do much in the face of overt and latent violence, while also nursing feelings and
visions of dissent. Ambivalence as a condition, predicament, and problematic has been essential
to feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies. For instance, Julietta Singh (2018) has written
extensively about ambivalence and its possibility to engender a queer feminist critique of the
agential subject through a reading practice that politicizes the slippages and contradictions of the
postcolonial subject. R. Radhakrishnan (2000) has claimed that postcoloniality is always already
marked by ambivalence, and that the task of scholars should be to politicize it. The visual
representations of errantry I have explored in this chapter do little to erase, cure, or resolve such
ambivalence, but they do gesture towards the political potential of ambivalence. What errantry
does in these films is linger at the emergent possibility of where to go from ambivalence, and
how one might get there. Representations of errantry in both films bridge everyday life, crisis,
and the potential to live and be otherwise. The potential to live and be otherwise signals the
emergent possibility of intersubjective solidarity which does not erase difference but instead uses
difference to negotiate gendered and classed predicaments. This emergent possibility can be
framed as the practice of relating to oneself and others that is based on friendship, mutual
pleasure, and mutual recognition of depression and dissatisfaction.
Take Care of My Cat and House of Hummingbird do not provide formulas of feminist
liberation or resolutions that guarantee a happy life. They interrogate how film by women, often
watched by other women, may arrive at horizons of feeling that do not serve heteropatriarchal
collectives. Both films feature girls and young women who are ultimately very concerned about

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the people around them as well as the world they inhabit. This concern for others is one of many
affective sites in these films where we might locate a feminist politics. Eun-hee mentions to her
tutor Young-ji that when she grows up, she hopes to create comics for those who are lonely. Taehee continues to lend Ji-young money, without any expectation of return, and stands by Ji-young
when she loses her home and family. Figures such as Eun-hee and Tae-hee indicate the potential
for solidarity with another in opposition to capitalism’s endless accumulation (Chatterjee 2022).
Solidarity is formed not solely on the basis of gender, but also on the basis of a mutual
problematization of what one is supposed to do. Jeong and Kim suggest that to be errant with
others can be political, as the friendships formed between their onscreen subjects facilitate
wandering from tacit mandates of normative social participation.
By way of conclusion, I return to the feminist possibility of errantry which I reframe as
an emergent politics of willfulness that spans South Korean feminist expressive texts across
generations, from the 1990s to the contemporary 2020s. To be identified as errant can indicate
willfulness, or insistence that one wanders or strays from what is good or acceptable (Ahmed
2014). In fact, the young female figures in Take Care of My Cat and House of Hummingbird are
often dismissed as willful by the people and institutions around them. Eun-hee is named a
delinquent at her school, Tae-hee is reprimanded by her father for refusing to eat with the family
and locking her room, and Ji-young’s innocence is questioned by the police due to her dyed hair
and her unwillingness to speak. These willful subjects refuse to adjust to an unjust world that
values individual success over communal wellness, boys over girls, men over women, and
capital over human lives. To cuss out one’s tyrannical teacher with a friend while jumping on a
trampoline, to go dancing with a girl one likes, to wander through a back alleyway with a friend,
to take a plane and leave the country. In all the above movements taken from both films, the

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beginnings of a choice emerge to be a stray, to be a wanderer, to be lost to what seeks to control
you. Such willfulness, the will to err or be errant, is an emergent politics that is practiced
consistently in Take Care of My Cat and House of Hummingbird, consciously and
subconsciously. Errantry, often willful, embraces the condition of the problem, whether that
condition entails being the problem or questioning a situation one finds problematic. To be the
problem or to question the problem might just mean to salvage what one can from an unbearable
situation.
Errantry in Take Care of My Cat and House of Hummingbird suggests the potential to
repossess and even repair one’s life by wandering or straying with a friend. Willfulness often
happens in proximity to others, especially other female youth. Friendship has been defined in
feminist and postmodern theoretical traditions as a bond that is cultivated between different
agents who are committed to appreciate and understand each other (De 2016) as well as a “vital
relationship with the Other” (Deleuze and Guattari 1991, 4). Through friendship, the girls and
women in Take Care of My Cat and House of Hummingbird reconfigure ways of relating to
themselves as well as other female youth away from school, home, and work environments that
are hostile to their thriving. I conclude this chapter with a scene in Take Care of My Cat that
bridges errantry, willfulness, and friendship. After handing out flyers at the Incheon Coastal
Passenger Terminal, Tae-hee hands Ji-young a wad of bills. When Ji-young asks when Tae-hee
needs the money back, Tae-hee answers, “Just pay me back when you can.” The camera captures
this brief exchange between the two friends in a shaky, moving medium shot, as if the camera is
also walking with them. As the two women keep walking, they get closer and closer to the
camera, and the audience can better glimpse the ambivalence of the exchange that plays out on
their facial expressions and body language. Ji-young seems at turns grateful, embarrassed, and

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melancholy, while Tae-hee gently observes Ji-young’s movements, a hesitant smile playing upon
her face which could signal concern, compassion, or pity. Ji-young brusquely tells Tae-hee to
stop looking at her, walking out of the frame and leaving Tae-hee staring after her. As Tae-hee
and Ji-young wander through the industrial landscape of Incheon, Tae-hee responds to Jiyoung’s fear of becoming like the homeless woman they pass by saying, “At times, I want to
follow them out of curiosity… Wouldn’t it be nice to wander around with no regrets?” Ji-young
responds, “You think that’s freedom? I don’t think so. What if something happens to you while
you’re wandering around?”
In this scene, both friends are pressed against their limitations: Tae-hee against her
bourgeois upbringing which makes her oblivious to the violence of poverty, and Ji-young against
her poverty, which haunts her with the possibility of losing her home. This scene communicates
how errantry is not without danger or threat, as Tae-hee and Ji-young’s mutual errantry
facilitates a dialogue about freedom that is far from utopic. Both willful women have their own
ideas about freedom, and although these ideas are fundamentally different due to their differing
class backgrounds, these ideas collide against each other and generate fruitful ground for an
exchange based on difference. Through Ji-young’s brusque refusal of Tae-hee’s concern and
Tae-hee’s desire to give Ji-young money with no expectation of a return, a friendship is formed
that is based on naming difference rather than easy identification with the other. In both Take
Care of My Cat and House of Hummingbird, errantry happens in proximity to disagreements and
ambivalent exchanges in friendships. Errantry’s emergent politics can be read as a feminist
politics that gestures towards the possibility of freedom through wandering and straying together,
not in uniformity but in difference.

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Chapter 4: Returning to the 1990s
Women’s Writing, Feminism Reboot, and Autotheory
This dissertation examines an archive of fictional texts that reckon with the everyday,
seemingly unremarkable moments of emotional feminine life entrenched in a national
temporality of transformation and crisis. The purpose of this dissertation thus far has been to
explore the politics of emotion in a set of literary and visual texts that are united through 1) how
they were gendered feminine in their reception, 2) their engagement with the decade of the 1990s
primarily through the feminist work of retrospective, including but not limited to remembering
decades past such as the 1980s in Mackerel, the 1960s in The Bird’s Gift, and the 1990s in House
of Hummingbird, and 3) how they mobilize emotions of feminine life to disrupt regimes of
gender normativity and generate emergent solidarities and knowledges oppositional to
heteropatriarchy. Rather than stop at the feminine or privilege the feminine as the reducible
interpretive framework for these texts, I have thought through how emotions represented as
attached to or in proximity to feminine experience in these texts disrupt ideologies of
womanhood essential to South Korea’s postcolonial nation building, including the relegation of
women as reproductive laborers or the manipulation of heteronormative love as a state-building
tool. If femininity is a recurrent theme in discourses surrounding 1990s South Korean literature
and film, what femininity feels like in literature and film evades the facile application of
“private/micro/internal/female discourses” (Shim 2015, 81) onto these texts. Attending to
emotion and how it becomes inextricable from embodied gendered effects of living in a certain
time and place privileges how subjects are moved in response to the currents of power around
them, rather than how they exhibit a natural femininity.
This final chapter maps theories and critiques surrounding the relationships between
emotions and women’s writing – by “writing,” I mean authorship broadly conceived in both

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literature and film – with attention to contemporary South Korean feminist criticism as well as
theories of feminist reading and writing that are not unique to the South Korean context. The
recurring theme of autotheory in the women’s literature and film in this project’s archive will
also be explored. The purpose of this chapter is to further reflect on the emergent feminist
commons made possible through reading and writing with pen and camera that unravels
available paradigms and discourses to make room for new acts of feeling askew from
heteropatriarchal, postcolonial grammars of gender vital to the modernized, newly democratized
nation. In beginning to map out the significance of women’s writing from 1990s South Korea to
the present day, I begin with a reflection on the global 1990s, a brief contextualization of 1990s
South Korea, and an analysis of 1990s South Korean cultural criticism that resonates with
feminist literary and film studies today.
Situating the Global 1990s and South Korean Literary Criticism of the 1990s
The 1990s on a global scale can be conceptualized as a postcolonial decade of
transformation and crisis. Although the Revolutions of 1989 heralded a post-socialist world or a
post-Cold War decade with the fall of the Eastern Bloc, many countries were unable to extricate
themselves from the ongoing violence of Cold War legacies. Demands for redress regarding
wartime legacies in the Asia and the Pacific were heightened in the 1990s. War was still very
much a global reality, exacerbated by ongoing colonial interventions and struggles for national
independence, as evidenced by the Gulf War, the Bosnian War, the Afghan Civil War, and the
Algerian Civil War, among others. The global HIV/AIDS epidemic continued to rage on in the
1990s. Civil unrest against state violence and empire continued to be a global reality, as seen in
the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The 1990s was as a decade of

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globalization during which the rise of cable television and the Internet generated an explosion of
movements and subcultures.
It is useful to read the 1990s as a postcolonial moment because, despite the fraught
political economy of the “post” in “postcolonial,” postcolonialism indicates what Jini Kim
Watson has described as “aftermaths, the persistence of pasts in the present, and the enduring
character of colonial transgressions, which is to say, the impossibility – and undesirability – of
drawing definitive lines between a before and after” (2018, 3). The emphasis on aftermaths is
key in conceptualizing the 1990s, because it was a decade shaped by the legacies of colonialism,
authoritarian and/or military nationalism, and revolution. South Korea was no exception. After
decades of military dictatorships following Japanese colonization and American military
occupation, as well as democratization achieved in the late 1980s by the anti-state, anticolonial
democratization movement that protested the Park and Chun regimes, the 1990s became the first
decade of civil government in South Korea’s history. It was during this transitional decade that a
rising tide of women artists and cultural workers challenged the endurance of hetero-patriarchy
after the nation’s shift from a military dictatorship through literature, film, and popular media.
The 1990s was the first decade in which feminist criticism became its own legitimate field in
South Korea, as theories of gender and sexuality became increasingly popular and feminism
became a critical keyword in cultural discourse.
In 1997, the Asian financial crisis, colloquially called “IMF” in South Korea, hit South
Korea hard, necessitating a bailout by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Although the
mass media focused on the plight of male breadwinners losing their jobs, it was single women,
female breadwinners, and married women who were the first to be laid off due to the assumption
that they did not need the work as much as men did; this assumption arose from the gendered

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division of labor of male breadwinner and female housewife, a vestige of postcolonial gender
ideologies of modernizing South Korea. The late 1990s became a period when “hypermasculine
ethics [sought] to resolve national anxieties by recuperating male agency at a time of economic
uncertainty” (Shin 2005, 119). Some scholars have attributed the gendered rhetoric arising from
the financial crisis, including the demand for women to raise the spirits of downtrodden fathers
and husbands disseminated in mass media, as responsible for the decline of the feminist
renaissance of the 1990s.
Stuart Hall has named the global “lesson” of the postcolonial 1990s the fact that political
binaries do not either stabilize the field of political antagonism in any permanent way or render it
transparently intelligible (1996, 244). In other words, the 1990s questioned the seemingly stable
signifier of the political, lingering instead at its opacities and ambivalences as we have seen in
critical vocabularies of postcolonialism and postmodernism that were particularly robust in
Anglophone and Korean academies. In South Korea, this lesson shook the arts in the form of
what Namhee Lee (2022) has called “paradigm shifts,” provoking questions about the function of
art amidst rapid globalization and commercialization in all sectors of national culture. According
to Lee, the 1990s were defined by “paradigm shifts from minjung (people) to simin (citizen),
from the political to the cultural, and from the collective to the individual” (2022, 2), and these
shifts situated the political ethos of the preceding democratization (minjung) movement as “a
grand narrative whose time had passed,” a horizon of emancipation that was considered no
longer suitable for the new era of the 1990s (2). In intellectual circles, these paradigm shifts
produced discourses that have in retrospective been characterized as post-authoritarian,
postmodern, and post-ideological. The “privileged ontological place” of minjung, a broad
dissident alliance of laborers, students, intellectuals, and politicians vital to the end of the

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dictatorial regime, was questioned, rendering anachronistic the previous generation’s
revolutionary ethos of antagonism in the cultural memory of the 1980s, an era of “streets strewn
with broken stones and Molotov cocktail bottles, riot police with their Darth Vader-like gear, and
the strident shouts of ‘Down with the military dictatorship!’ and ‘Liberation of labor’ (nodong
haebang)” (Lee 2022, 8-9). Increasingly, scholars of South Korea have demonstrated how the
rupture between the 1980s and 1990s is very much discursively constructed, arguing that
national temporality at the advent of democracy could be more productively conceived of as the
intermingling of past and present.
We can turn to South Korean literature as a case study to examine how the 1990s were
popularly periodized as a post-revolutionary decade of anti-ideology. In the South Korean
literary scene of the 1990s, debates about authenticity in the newly anti-ideological “literariness”
(munhak juui) signaled a break from the literature as activism model of the 1980s in mainstream
discourse. This paradigm of authenticity featured 1) the prevalence of the individual’s interior
truth as opposed to 1980s realism which focused on historical and societal interests (Hwang
1306) and 2) the emphasis on the individual’s sensory perceptions and details of experience
(Hwang 1317). The South Korean retrospective on 1990s literature finds a significant portion of
its origins in a heavily periodized, gendered discourse that associates the rupture or break
between 1980s and 1990s literature with emotional, private women’s literature, as opposed to the
socially engaged literature of the 1980s. 1990s literature was often written about in affective
terms, most famously by Hwang Jong-yeon who coined the term “ethical feeling” which referred
to a sincerity in the depiction of the abject in 1990s literature. Such a literary truthfulness or
authenticity which supposedly permeates major works by 1990s writers became a popular
discursive paradigm used to demonstrate what made 1990s literature unique. Fascinatingly, this

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“ethical feeling” is engaged with through temporality (the 1990s) over gender and sexuality in
Hwang’s interpretation. In his analysis, women’s literature is relegated to the realm of the
everyday, and there is not much discussion about how truthfulness or authenticity may be
manipulated or dismissed according to gender.
Turning to Hwang’s contemporaries such as Kim Mi-hyŏn and Sin Su-chŏng unearths a
richer critical engagement with gender and sexuality in 1990s literary criticism. Kim Mi-hyŏn
was one of the most prominent feminist cultural critics of 1990s South Korea. She discussed the
past and future of women’s literature in her book Beyond Women’s Literature (Yŏsŏng
munhakŭl nŏmŏ, 2002), dividing her approach into keywords including “Herstory,” “Gender,”
“Reality,” and “Power.” By attending to how South Korean women writers situated women’s
bodies, sensations, and language in literature to interrogate patriarchy, capitalism, and
colonialism, Kim sought to understand how women in literature came to be conscious of their
identities marked by difference, and how those identities related to their realities. In Kim’s most
famous essay in Beyond Women’s Literature, “Between the Little Mermaid and the Amazon,”
she interprets women’s bodies as possessing the duality of the little mermaid (a body colonized
by patriarchal reproduction, since the little mermaid grows legs which enables her to bear
children) and the Amazon (the resisting woman who seeks to become the rightful owner of her
body through her cut-off breast). Through these socio-cultural figures that, according to Kim,
must surpass female biology, Kim explores the political ambivalence of women’s bodies in her
essay.
Sin Su-chŏng, a feminist contemporary of Kim, also focused on the politics of language
in women’s literature which she theorized as inextricable from ambivalence. Sin’s volume of
critical essays Meat Hanging in the Butcher’s Shop (P'ujutkane kŏllin kogi, 2003) discusses the

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up-and-coming writers of the 1990s, with a wider discussion of 1990s literature as refusing
collective norms by making meaning from individual experiences. In her analysis of Shin
Kyung-sook’s fiction, Sin argues that women’s language betrays a desire for writing or
communicating in a language other than the dominant one. Sin frames women’s writing through
the “scream” (pimyŏng), proposing that the scream possesses a force rawer and more immediate
than the societal system of signs that surrounds it. That something is “a language that cannot be
verbalized” (2003, 20). Citing Jacques Lacan, Marguerite Duras, Shin Kyung-sook, and Kim
Hye-soon, Sin interprets women’s writing as a chaotic, ambivalent language that continually
shuttles between suffering and jouissance.
Both Kim and Sin’s meditations on the political possibilities of South Korean women’s
literature linger at themes of duality, ambivalence, repression, and failed catharsis. For Kim,
women’s bodies are defined by both colonizing forces and resistant impulses. For Sin, women’s
writing possesses the primal energy of the scream which communicates both suffering and
jouissance, or the effects of being trapped in a dominant system of signs and the effects of
breaking free from that system. The scream, on the edge of semantic availability, blurs the
disciplining boundary between interior and exterior, self and collective. Both Kim and Sin offer
modes of feminist reading that position women’s writing as a contradictory body of work that
engages the limitations and possibilities of the biological and the social, repression and catharsis,
silence and speech, colonization and resistance. If, as Barbara Johnson (1998) has reminded us,
ambivalence is a critical state that must repeatedly be returned to in feminism, critics such as
Kim and Sin were working through emergent epistemologies about women’s writing fixated on
the ambivalence of navigating the exchange between dominance and transformation, mired in the
contradictory temporality of the postmodern and the postcolonial.

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Emergent feminist epistemologies of womanhood on women’s own terms also translated
to the screen in 1990s South Korea. The 1990s were a “belle epoque” of cinema for South Korea,
a kind of “cine-renaissance” after the military dictatorships during which critical discourse on
cinema flourished as well as people’s exposure to cinema (Son 2016, 52). South Korean
women’s film, broadly conceived as film by women directors and filmmakers, was something of
a phenomenon in the 1990s not unlike women’s literature. Documentary films especially became
popular among women directors in South Korea during the 1990s and into the 2000s. Women’s
documentary narratives harken back to the tradition of “individual film” (kaein yŏnghwa) or
personal/private film (sajŏk yŏnghwa) popular in the independent film scene in the late 1980s
and early 1990s. As Youngmin Choe has noted, contemporary South Korean women filmmakers
have employed the documentary form to “reframe and re-evaluate the construction of affective
truth, by considering ways in which memories of the past become inscribed into specific spaces
and thus engage in affective historiography” (2015, 134). Indeed, rewriting time and place
through affective truth – positioned as truth by its being lived – situates women’s fictional and
nonfictional everyday experiences as their own political text. Women’s documentary films of the
1990s and 2000s insisted on the intimate relationship between the personal and the political.
Films incorporating women in everyday and domestic spaces became more popular in the 1990s
and early 2000s, such as Chakŭn p'uredo irŭmi issŭni (“Even Little Grass Has Its Own Name,”
1990), directed by Byun Young-joo that documented the oppression women workers faced in the
office and in the home such as sexual harassment and shouldering all the reproductive labor, and
Koch'umalligi (“Making Sun-dried Red Peppers,” 1999), directed by Chang Hŭi-sŏn which
follows the conversations between three generations of women as they prepare to dry red peppers
on their apartment roof.

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Son Hŭi-chŏng, the feminist scholar who coined the viral phrase “feminism reboot” to
indicate the rise of South Korean feminist movements post-2016, has noted that South Korean
women of the 1990s onscreen and offscreen were caught between traditional demands of identity
and new possibilities (2016, 56). Many romantic comedies targeting female audiences came out
in the 1990s which featured new female figures for female consumers to aspire to such as “the
new generation woman,” “the new generation housewife” and the “careerwoman.” In these
romantic comedies, women were increasingly portrayed as liberal entities who had the
possibility to achieve agency under capitalism, while also circumscribed to the ideology of
motherhood, as evidenced by how many of these films ended in the fulfillment of a nuclear
family in the name of motherhood (55). We still see this happening in mainstream South Korean
visual media today, although the recent feminist movements have provided fertile ground for
films and TV dramas that question women’s heteronormative roles beholden to the nuclear
family, such as House of Hummingbird (Pŏlsae, 2018) and Little Women (Chakŭn assidŭl, 2022).
If contemporary South Korea is indeed an age of “feminism reboot,” how can we account
for the ongoing femicides happening in public places such as subway restrooms and universities,
the persistent wage gap based on gender, rampant homophobia, and the continuing rise of the
right as evidenced by the election of Yoon Seok Yeol as president that was partly made possible
by his promise to anti-feminists to abolish South Korea’s Ministry of Gender Equality? There is
at the present moment in South Korea a contradictory reality unfolding when it comes to gender
and sexuality – feminism has become more visible than it has in decades, arguably since the late
1990s, and while feminists continue to resist, make art, and critique the many manifestations of
gendered violence at the everyday level, the condition of being in a body that is not coded as
heterosexual, ethnically Korean, or male is one fraught with psychic and corporeal peril. Son

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Hŭi-chŏng has noted that hatred as an emotion is magnified in neoliberal South Korea because it
blocks solidarity and it enables discrimination between self and other, excluding the other and
isolating the self (2017, 225). What can feminist arts do when hatred against women and queer
people remains heightened, when the public is seemingly more equipped to talk about feminism
than intentionally practice it?
Feminist scholars in South Korea have recently turned to the 1990s to reflect upon their
fraught contemporary moment. The turn to the 1990s, or the return to women’s literature and
film of the 1990s, can be felt in many recent works of South Korean feminist scholarship. For
example, the spring 2023 issue of the journal Feminism and Korean Literature (Yŏsŏng munhak
yŏn'gu) published by The Academic Society of Feminism and Korean Literature (Han'guk
yŏsŏng munhak'ak'oe) places Son Hŭi-chŏng seminal phrase “feminism reboot” as adjacent to
the 1990s. The issue calls for a re-exploration of 1990s literature, and two of the articles
published in the issue conduct feminist readings of 1990s women’s literature by writers such as
Shin Kyung-sook, Eun Hee-kyung, and Jung Kyung-rin.40 By turning to the 1990s, these
scholars excavate an enduring genealogy of arts-oriented feminist critique and activism that
privileges continuity over rupture between decades. For instance, the renaissance of popular
feminist texts in the 1990s has been attributed to the feminist collectives of the 1980s that
advanced the importance of connecting lived experience to creative practice. The connection
between women’s liberation literature of the 1980s and women’s literature of the 1990s has been
discussed by scholars such as Lee Hye-ryoung, who notes that despite the fact that 1990s
women’s literature was often delimited to gendered paradigms of so-called traditional feminine
sensibility, the history of women’s literature (yŏsŏng munhak) originates from the critical
40 Kim Ji-yoon, “True Reboot” (Chinjŏnghan ribut'ŭ), Feminism and Korean Literature (Yŏsŏng munhak yŏn'gu)
58, no. 2: 2,3.

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impulse to create a more inclusive, less sexually stereotyped alternative to the upper-class label
of yoryu munhak or ladies’ literature, which was replaced by yŏsŏng haebang munhak or
women’s liberation literature in the 1980s.41 A look into the third issue of Another Culture (Tto
hana ŭi munhwa, 1987) reveals how feminist intellectuals involved in the democratization
movement insisted that rigid definitions of activism must be broken through phrases such as “to
live is to protest,” (sam i kot undong ida).42 By relocating women’s negotiation of everyday life
as a site of protest and resistance, 1980s feminist intellectuals diverged from the male-centric
proponents of labor literature that located resistance in the struggles of male workers against the
backdrop of factories or universities. Similarly, women’s film collectives active during the 1980s
such as Nue, which included prominent women filmmakers such as Kim Soyoung, preceded the
feminist independent and documentary films of the 1990s through their experimental challenges
to the patriarchal gaze in cinema. The critical impulses of these 1980s feminist writing traditions
echo into the 1990s and the 2010s, as seen in this project’s archive. To study women’s writing in
relation to the 1990s, then, is to examine it in relation to its feminist pasts and futures. The 1990s
was in many ways the predecessor of what Son has termed “feminism reboot.”
Practices of Women’s Writing
I started this dissertation with the hope of beginning to address the question, what does it
mean for women to write and be read? This question’s evasion of a transparent answer or
solution seems necessary from a feminist perspective. In context of this project, reading could
indicate reading a novel as well as watching a film, gesturing towards a process of receiving or
interpreting texts in relation to one’s own knowledges and experiences. Indeed, this project joins
41 Lee, Hye-ryoung (2018: 170). 42 Go, Jung-hui. 1987. Tto hana ŭi munhwa no. 3: 25-27.

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recent efforts in South Korean feminist criticism to change the reading practices surrounding
women’s texts and the 1990s, in the process arguably changing the very primary texts
themselves. Barbara Johnson has remarked that it is through contact with literature that
theoretical tools become useful precisely because such contact changes and dissolves these tools
in the hands of the user. Although Johnson was writing in context of literature, her formulation
of the process of reading can be extended to visual texts as well. Both literature and film can be
situated as “the place where impasses can be kept open for examination, where questions can be
guarded and not forced into a premature validation of the available paradigms” (Johnson 1998,
13). This dissertation has been an exercise in examining how South Korean women’s literature
and film challenge the available paradigms of sentimentality, private life, and interiority,
emphasizing impasses of representation regarding femininity and the 1990s that posit ways of
theorizing the relationships between emotion, women, and writing that stray from interpretive
mastery regarding reading, gender, and periodization.
Contemporary South Korean women’s literature and film can be situated in conversation
and in solidarity with traditions of women’s writing across the globe. The reframing of “selfconfession” (chagi kobaek) as feminist politics rather than inherently feminine interiority in
South Korean women’s literature and film can be read adjacently to self-writing in American
women of color feminist writing. In many ways, women’s writing in the American women of
color feminist traditions by writers such as Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Nellie Wong, Gloria
Anzaldua, and others prefigure the affective turn in Western humanities that is rooted in
methodologies of continental philosophers and psychoanalysts whose scholarship often
foregrounds whiteness. It is indeed invigorating to think about how affect studies as an academic
field would change if we placed its primary interlocutors and origin points in expressive texts

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that circumvent Western metropolitanism and whiteness. The texts in this dissertation do not fit
comfortably into the “affective turn” in Western academia that has been famously theorized by
Patricia Clough and Michael Hardt (2007). By positioning South Korean women’s literature and
film as transformative for how we approach emotion in feminist studies, we can return to how
women’s writing in transcultural traditions can contribute to our knowledge of the relationship
between emotion, writing, and politics.
Both women of color feminist traditions of writing and South Korean women’s texts of
the 1990s position the act of writing as the “disidentification and subversion of dominant forms
of knowledge” which cultivates feminist and queer intimacies (Garcia-Rojas 2016, 256). While
race, an integral analytic in women of color feminist writing, is certainly not as robustly
interrogated in South Korean women’s literature and film due to the dominance of ethnic Korean
subjectivities, the commitment to knowledges oppositional to patriarchy, capitalism, and colonial
gender ideologies through a “language of self” that interrogates social emotions (Garcia-Rojas
2016, 254) offers a point of resonance. Another point of resonance is the emphasis on the bodily
or fleshly, the everyday, and the domestic as politically charged and transformative sites. In the
Introduction to the seminal anthology of women of color feminisms titled This Bridge Called My
Back (1981), the editors Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga insist that “the revolution begins
at home” and advance a “theory in the flesh” they define as “[a theory] where the physical
realities of our lineage… all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity” and “telling our stories
in our own words.”43 Whether it is Gong Ji-young’s attention to the depressive housewife at
home or Eun Hee-kyung’s transgressive positioning of ordinary figures such as the rat, South
Korean women’s texts especially in proximity to the 1990s provoke resonances with American
43 Anzaldua and Moraga, “Introduction,” xlvii-19.

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women of color feminisms in their shared investment in everyday lived experience as a site of
insurgence.
Trinh T. Minh-ha, a vital interlocutor of women of color feminisms, has written that it
becomes a near-impossible task to define what a woman precisely is due to the proliferation of
discourses surrounding her. She has been recorded as “a passive substance, a parasite, an
enigma… night, disorder, and immanence…” (1989, 97). She is the “disturbing factor,” unable
to be captured, a “key to the beyond” (97). Perhaps this is why the conditions of womanhood are
so intimately linked to acts of writing and reading. There are so many languages about women.
To be intimately familiar and vigilant about the way one is read could be framed as a condition
of womanhood. Women writing with pen and camera, then, becomes a critical process has the
potential to play with, unravel, circumvent, and question existing epistemologies of womanhood.
The emotions represented and produced through such writing can perform what Xine Yao has
called “epistemological and ontological refutation” (2022, 12), upending taken-for-granted truth
or reality through textual representations.
I turn to Hélène Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976) to think through the
continuing significance of women’s writing regarding the reframing of the political in patriarchal
reading and writing cultures. According to Cixous, “woman” can be defined as someone in an
“inevitable struggle against conventional man.” 44 Her meditations on the feminine situate
women and women’s writing as oppositional to phallic systems of language and everyday life.
The woman is a repressive figure governed by emotions of fear and shame who has been taught
to say and show nothing. She houses “outbursts,” and her body is the text that must be written
and read; it is a singing text/body that must be heard. The release of such outbursts through
44 Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa,” 875-893.

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writing is likened to “immense resources of the unconscious,” a flammable “naphtha” that
spreads throughout the world and defies the dollars of capitalist patriarchy.45 Cixous emphasizes
that women’s writing is a practice of worlding. In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” women’s writing
is expressed as an intersection of histories where “personal history blends together with the
history of all women, as well as national and world history.”46 Woman as a writing entity
unthinks unifying, regulating, homogenizing history, mobilizing contradictions as liberational
energies. Thus, Cixous demonstrates how women’s writing can be understood as a means of
rethinking the historical subject. By leaving ajar the definition of a feminine practice of writing,
while also insisting upon its existence, Cixous challenges phallocentric discourse. Women’s
writing heralds the return of the “repressed” of culture and society – “an explosive, utterly
destructive, staggering return, with a force never yet unleashed…”47 Reappropriating Freudian
hysterics, Cixous claims that what has traditionally been dismissed as female hysteria produces
“thundering denunciations.”48 The feminine text is expressed as subversive, “volcanic” in that it
shatters phallocentric truth with laughter.49 “The Laugh of the Medusa” reveals a poetics of
women’s writing that locates its feminist politics in contradictions and ambivalences – repressed
and cathartic, personal and global, haunted by self-shaming and moving towards unbridled love
for the other based on difference.
Cixous’ essay can teach us how the affective and the embodied feminine informs the very
possibilities of writing. It seems that women’s writing, according to Cixous, cannot be discussed
without an examination of repression in feminine experience. Repression is an overwhelmingly
45 Ibid, 880.
46 Ibid, 882.
47 Ibid, 886.
48 Ibid, 886.
49 Ibid, 888.

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omnipresent affective poetics that permeates the texture of each novel and film in this project’s
archive of contemporary South Korean women’s texts. In Mackerel, the former activist is
perceived as a leaky container of negative affect, a woman who has been coded as emotionally
excessive in the progressive spaces she has traversed. The figure of the silenced scream surfaces
during one of her visits to the hospital where she hears an injured man screaming. The repression
of expressions of suffering, a repeated act, is a theme throughout the novel. These repressive
dynamics surface in Go Alone as well through figures of the neglected, gaslighted wife’s
resigned laughter, the silenced sobs of the victim of domestic abuse in relation to the trapped
humidity of tears in the body, a state of repression that is gendered feminine. In The Bird’s Gift,
the girls’ disaffected gaze channels insurgent potential, revealing often repressive moments in
ordinary gendered life in which state vocabularies of postcolonial gender and sexuality
(vocabularies that permeate intimate, domestic life) are intentionally and playfully disrupted. The
entire novel can be read as an alternative feminist semiotics of militarized modernity theorized
by the figure of the obdurate, watchful girl, with special attention to emotions such as sadness
which are gendered feminine and which problematize the seemingly natural roles and emotions
of womanhood in a rapidly modernizing postcolonial nation. In Take Care of My Cat and House
of Hummingbird, errantry becomes a feminist and queer mode of navigating various states of
precarity with the potential of reclaiming or recuperating life amidst precarity. Precarity, which
signals the failure of familial and ethnonational belonging rooted in economic possessions and
blood relations, creates conditions of emotional repression in troubled figures such as the
schoolgirl, the office worker, and the unemployed young woman in search of work.
This project’s archive lingers at what happens when that which is repressed – negative or
ambivalent emotions regarding how one is expected to act as a relational feminine being such as

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a wife, mother, daughter, student, and worker in a post-revolutionary, increasingly neoliberal
society – returns to consciousness. According to Sigmund Freud, the essence of repression lies in
turning something away and keeping it at a distance from the conscious (1915, 147) and the
process of repression must be regarded as “a persistent expenditure of force” rather than an event
which takes place once (1915, 151). The fate of the material that undergoes repression is
twofold: either it is banished from the consciousness or it returns to consciousness. Repression
not only inhibits instinctual drives, but also facilitates their discharge (Akhtar 2022, 254). In this
case, a return to consciousness indicates the process of representing these emotions on the page
or screen, as well as the process of reckoning with such emotions in the fictional worlds of
literature and film inextricable from the physical and psychic conditions of the lived world of
readers, writers, and filmmakers as evidenced by the waves of feminist criticism on these works
that bridge the personal and the fictional.
What we can gather from Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa” is that women’s writing
draws its explosive energies from its oppositional stance in relation to patriarchal semantics of
identity, art, and history. If women’s writing has the potential to be as flammable as “naptha”
that taps into resources of the unconscious, drawing from personal, national, and world histories,
this project positions emotion as the very source of naptha. I am aware of the stickiness of my
attachment to women’s writing, or my attachment to women, as it may produce tensions with
recent interventions in South Korean queer critique pioneered by scholars such as Oh Hae-jin
that calls for a repositioning of feminism as a “location of questioning” that interrogates the
demands made of so-called “real women.”50 The women’s texts I have examined in this
dissertation are by no means faithful to biological, reproductive womanhood; their repeated
50 Oh Hae-jin, “2017 ‘p'eminijŭm sosŏl’ pangmulji,” Hankyoreh, November 26, 2017,
https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/opinion/column/820744.html

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representations of patriarchal domesticity signal a critical impulse to render strange and
depressive the very demands that make women “real” in modern South Korean society.
Emotions arising from everyday, domestic, and feminine life in Mackerel, Go Alone Like the
Rhinoceros’ Horn, The Bird’s Gift, House of Hummingbird, and Take Care of My Cat serve a
testimonial function not only because they disrupt binaries of private and public, personal and
political integral to South Korea’s postcolonial vocabulary of modernity, but also because they
reconstitute the very idea of what is true in these fictional worlds. By attending to affective
historiographies that make public what has been repressed in the mundanity of gendered life
under the pressures of rapid modernization and democratization, South Korean women’s
literature and film challenges the psychic and emotional demands of that women continue to face
despite the national claim to democracy and progress.
Minor Transnational Resonances of 1990s Women’s Literature
In the previous section, I turned to Cixous not merely to apply her theories of women’s
writing to my archive, but to evoke an intertext that may illuminate the fixation with repressed
embodiments and identities in South Korean women’s literature and film. As Kim Mi-hyŏn and
Sin Su-chŏng have demonstrated, indirectly in conversation with Cixous in their shared interest
in psychoanalytic interpretations of women’s writing, woman as a writing entity can be framed
as a coming into another consciousness alternative to phallocentric narrative and history through
the language of embodied difference, or more broadly, embodied knowledge. How might we
ground such embodied knowledges in post-socialist temporalities that shaped not only
contemporary South Korean women’s writing, but also other postcolonial, post-socialist
traditions of women’s writing?

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In this section, I turn to a brief comparative study of texts that may shed light on how my
readings of South Korean women’s literature and women’s film may relate to transnational
feminist cultural production including Chinese literature and Egyptian literature. In this brief
section, I conduct a minor transnational reading of how women writers from East Asia and North
Africa wrote about embodiment in the 1990s, a temporality of political disappointment that
follows the revolutionary promises of varying socialist humanisms in national literatures and
cultures.51 For instance, in Egypt, not unlike in South Korea, the 1990s marked a decade of
intensive identity seeking focused especially on feminist issues. The new generation of Egyptian
writers in the 1990s felt “a keen sense of alienation and disappointment with the ideals of the
parent generation who had facilitated political and social change” (Anishchenkova 2017, 89), not
unlike the 386 Generation of writers in South Korea that had to contend with the depression and
disappointment after the democratization movement of the 1980s (Park 2020, 6).
Egyptian women’s writing that rose to prominence in the 1990s is strikingly resonant
with South Korean women’s literature of the 1990s in thematic content and reception, namely in
the shared similarities of reckoning with feminist possibilities of language in an age following a
national temporality remembered as revolutionary. Similarly to the anxiety of the feminization of
national literature in 1990s South Korea, masculinist backlash regarding a supposed obsession
with the body and feminine experience pervaded the reception of the new wave of feminist
writing in 1990s Egypt. The derogatory label of “kitabat al-banat” or “girls’ writing” was applied
to an extensive body of work by women writers in 1990s Egypt by state-owned literary
journals.52 Indeed, the infantilization or girl-ification of women’s writing can also be seen in the
South Korean literary field of the 1990s, in which Shin Kyung-sook, a woman writer who
51 Minor Transnationalism (2005) edited by Shu-mei Shih and Francoise Lionnet. 52 Mehrez, “Where Have All the Families Gone: Egyptian Literary Texts of the Nineties,” 34.

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remains iconic to 1990s literature, was framed as a girlish, sentimental newcomer to national
literature. As my readings of Kim Mi-hyŏn and Sin Su-chŏng demonstrate, the body became a
feminist arena of contestation in literary criticism in 1990s South Korea as well as a core
problematic of women’s writing.
In her reading of Miral al-Tahawy’s novel Blue Aubergine (1998), Valerie
Anishchenkova notes that “the gloom of the 1990s” made way for “the emergence of new
literature” by the first literary generation that was conscious of gender equality.53 1990s Egyptian
literature by writers such as Sumayyah Ramadan, Muntasir al-Qaffash, Miral al-Tahawy, and
Atif Sulayman rebelled against the national literary establishment through “subversive
distortions” in content and language through the inclusion of taboo subjects, street slang, texting
lingo, and e-language, ultimately transforming the national literary canon.54 Many authors of the
1990s generation in Egypt became known as the “Sharquiyat generation,” named after Dar alSharqiyat, one of the smaller private publishing houses that was open to experimentation.55 The
1990s in Egypt mirror the 1990s in South Korea in the increased privatization of literary journals
and collectives, and the association with the new 1990s generation of writers with these private
publishing houses such as Munhaktongne that first published Eun Hee-kyung.
Similar to the discursive fixation with interiority and private life in 1990s South Korean
cultural discourse, the modern Chinese literary scene in the 1990s gave rise to the popularity of
terms “personalization” and “privatization” in critical circles and book markets.56 The
personalization of literary discourse suggested an alternative to the subjectivities promoted by
53 Anishchenkova, “Feminist Voices of the 1990s Generation: A Quest for Identity in Miral al-Tahawy’s Blue
Aubergine,” 90-91. 54 Ibid, 91. 55 Ibid, 92.
56 Hong Jiang, “The Personalization of Literature: Chinese Women’s Writing in the 1990s,” 5.

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socialist humanism in the 1980s, as well as intellectuals’ acceptance of an increasingly
commercial society and global modernity. Chinese women’s writing of the 1990s was widely
received as preoccupied with first-person perspectives, confession, and sexuality, all associated
with private life. For example, Wang Anyi’s novel Ballad of Eternal Sorrow (Chang hen ge,
1995) was received as a novel of everyday life and feminine private spaces of Shanghai. Other
commercially successful novels had some iteration of the word “private” in their titles, such as
Chen Ran’s Private Life (Siren shenghuo, 1996), and An Dun’s Absolute Privacy: Recording
Contemporary Chinese People’s Emotions (Juedui yinsi: dangdai Zhongguoren qinggan shi
lu,1998). Featuring hidden or invisible emotional selves, these novels played with the
possibilities of authenticity and confession, especially regarding gender and sexuality in a postsocialist society.
Returning to the Feminist Possibilities of Autotheory
This project’s commitment to writing and its relationship to emotion and gender is in
constant dialogue with two critical influences that can hopefully be felt throughout this
dissertation: the Public Feelings project in Anglo-American affect studies and American women
of color feminism. These two critical traditions are intertwined in their recuperation of political
potential in sites of negativity (negative emotion and/or affect, suspended agency, etc.) as well as
their troubling of the Cartesian subject with attention to how gendered and racialized
subjectivities are challenged, constituted, and transformed through emotive energies. This
chapter thinks alongside the resounding legacies of the Public Feelings project and American
women of color feminism, attending to how affective truths in an archive may, through the
critique of the self, move between living, thinking, and making (Fournier 2021, 490).

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This section integrates an autotheoretical approach that reveals the emotive, gendered
aspects of producing and consuming texts that are not only vital to my research processes, but
also to the representations of emotional girls and women in my archive. If autotheory entails the
“relationship between criticality and the personal in ways that are self-aware” (Fournier 2021,
15), the novels and films I have explored certainly generate a feminist autotheoretical space
between life and fiction that fuses the personal to the critical. For example, both Mackerel and
Go Alone were inspired by Gong Ji-young’s own participation in the democratization movement.
House of Hummingbird was inspired by Kim Bo-ra’s childhood and adolescence growing up in
Seoul. Each of these texts critique the self that is inflected by class, gender, and sexuality –
fictional and real – moving between living, thinking, and making. The feminist responses to
these texts are autotheoretical as well, as the authors frequently incorporate their own lived
experiences in their readings, enmeshing their selves with the fictional selves presented in the
texts as well as those who wrote and directed these texts. We have observed this in the essays on
House of Hummingbird and Take Care of My Cat. As this chapter and previous chapters have
demonstrated, autotheory is an integral mode through which readers and critics responded to
contemporary women’s texts in South Korea.
Each figure of the willful, errant girl and woman in this project’s archive is a theorist in
her own right. Whether, like Eun-rim in Mackerel, she pens diary entries about what it means to
survive as a struggling single woman in 1990s Seoul, or like Jin-hee in The Bird’s Gift, she
playfully manipulates the heteronormative gender roles crucial to postcolonial nation building,
these figures are intimately attuned to making meaning out of their place in environments that
are at best ambivalent about their survival. These fictional figures write their own subjectivities
in the worlds they inhabit, attentive to and moved by the flows of power around them. For

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example, Jin-hee’s counter-hegemonic gaze in The Bird’s Gift could be interpreted as a mode of
feminist reading of gender and sexuality under militarized modernity. Eun-hee’s errant
movements in House of Hummingbird could be adjacent to a feminist rewriting of the self in
disciplinary, repressive environments such as the home and the school that demand goodness and
obedience. In Take Care of My Cat, the wandering movements of young women struggling with
crises of family and unemployment in public spaces such as the streets may also indicate
emergent feminist rewritings of the public and the private with attention to difference and
friendship in an increasingly neoliberal national temporality founded upon blood relations and
economic possessions. The struggling woman novelist’s solitary meditations on motherhood and
wifehood could be read as texts of their own in Go Alone, as well as the former activist’s
scattered posthumous diary entries interrogating memories of love and revolution in Mackerel.
These writing figures produce texts comprised of their ways of being in the world or more
specifically how they are moved emotionally and physically.
These writing figures in this project’s archive are also reading figures. The ubiquity of
reading and writing in this archive indicates the porous boundaries between textuality in fiction
and the politics of women’s writing the writers of such fiction find themselves implicated in. In
The Bird’s Gift, the classical Chinese epic The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Samgukchi) is
evoked in relation to a childhood vendetta originating from a dismissive comment about how
girls cannot read at the same level as boys. In Mackerel, German writers such as Karl Marx and
Herman Hesse are evoked to indicate the opposite ends of a political spectrum from
revolutionary realism (Marx) to bourgeois romanticism (Hesse) in the 1980s student
democratization movement. In Go Alone, French poet Alfred de Musset’s poem “Tristesse”
(“Sadness”) is evoked to allude to the depressive moods of the protagonist who is struggling to

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write and recover from a terrible divorce. Manga, most notably the classic 1970s shojo manga
The Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no Bara), is repeatedly referenced in House of Hummingbird
to indicate the protagonist’s passions divergent from educational and familial obligations. In
Take Care of My Cat, young women read text messages to anticipate each other’s trajectories in
Incheon and Seoul, at times converging although more often diverging from a common
experience or location. The pairing of acts of reading and writing in relation to sites of emotion
in these works suggests that the feminist problems of how to read and write are intertwined with
emotion.
I turn to Gong Ji-young’s afterwords for her novels Go Alone and Mackerel as a case
study of how autotheory presents its relevance in my archive. In the afterword to Mackerel,
Gong Ji-young reminisces about a retreat she went on hosted by the Christian Academy, a
progressive Protestant educational collective active in South Korea (1959-2000), and Another
Culture (Tto hanaŭi munhwa), a feminist activist collective active in the 1980s and 1990s known
for their eponymous feminist journal. Gong reflects on how she felt bewildered by the youth of
at the retreat, presumably in their twenties. She explains how this feeling of bewilderment
coincided with the numb grief she felt upon hearing about the recent death of a friend who is
implied to have been one of Gong’s former comrades during her participation in student activism
in the previous decade of the 1980s. The afterword is punctuated by emotions arising from
disorientation in the present decade, as well as memories of a past that is not past.
A common affective thread that unites the novel and the afterword is the refusal to let the
past go, simultaneous with the desire to shed the past’s looming influence in the present. Gong
writes, “I wanted to be free of memories of the 80s” (300). As a middle-class “bourgeois”
intellectual with an activist past, Gong finds the hope of the previous revolutionary decade

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painful to evoke because that hope has deflated in the present 1990s. She positions Mackerel as a
novel that that is a reconciliation with the generation that witnessed the 1980s, refuting the
accusation of anachronism. Gong’s consistent evocation of a political hope in the afterword is
haunted by an implicit fear that rekindling or continuing the politics of the previous decade is
impossible. These conflicting emotions that permeate the afterword are kindred to Eun-rim’s
shuttling between the possibility of a revolutionary politics after the event of revolution and her
overwhelming depression in Mackerel.
From reminiscing about the retreat, Gong transitions to an episode in her apartment,
where she wakes up in the middle of the night and has a revelation of sorts about the novel she
feels she must write: “Suddenly the faces of my many friends who are struggling to get by in this
world surfaced in the darkness… Why can’t they adjust to this change… and why can I only
think of them in the middle of the night… I erased all the things I had written and started this
novel the day after” (301). “This change” indicates the present decade of the 1990s, in which her
former comrades were struggling to adjust to the neoliberal ethos of a newly democratized South
Korea; “this change” could also indicate what Namhee Lee has called the “paradigm shifts” that
occurred after South Korea’s democratization in 1987, shifts from minjung (people) to simin
(citizen), the political to the cultural, and the collective to the individual (2022, 2). The vision of
her friends’ faces in the darkness acts as a revelation to the listless, bewildered, politically
disappointed writer; the reminder of collective experience soothes the isolation of individual
experience.
The afterword lingers at the question of what it means to write. Writing, for Gong, should
be connected to a collective larger than the self. Citing Hemingway, Gong likens those who
experienced their youths in the 1980s (including herself) as a kind of lost generation. Gong

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concludes her afterword with phrases such as “Now I know the past does not just disappear”
(302). In her reflections on writing as a collective-oriented practice, Gong reveals the echoes of
literary sensibilities of the previous decade that positioned literature as activism. She mentions in
the afterword all the things she owns – her writing, her name, her coffee cup, her apartment’s
veranda, her book – are “not hers alone” (302). She writes, “My writing is not my writing, my
name does not call only to me…” (302). In these reflections, we may glimpse a lingering Marxist
mentality towards possessions and the function of art. The afterword suggests that Mackerel is an
homage to the past which continues to insert itself in the present, a writing project that
reimagines the collective from the perspective of the depressive, remembering female figure.
The afterword for Go Alone concludes with Gong’s dedication of the novel to her
grandmother, “my mother’s mother Mrs. Pak Ah-ji… Born in the early 20th century, who
ardently lived through those turbulent years as a mother of six children, and who is now in such a
deep state of dementia that even on days the entire family gathers she goes out to the yard and
mutters that she must wait for someone…” (304). The afterword begins with the fictional,
allegorical figure of Nora from Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and ends with the
autobiographical figure of the grandmother whose dementia-induced muttering evokes the
untranslatable living through of “turbulent years” of Japanese imperialism and U.S. military
occupation. Both Nora and Gong’s grandmother are figures that interrogate the unresolved
“woman question” (yŏsŏng munje) that continues to haunt South Korea today. Nora was often
evoked in debates about women’s place in society during Korea’s colonial period, and Gong’s
grandmother experienced Japan-occupied Korea firsthand. Gong connects fiction with life in her
afterword by returning to the coloniality of gender in the South Korean literary imaginary,
inextricable from her personal imaginary of the women who came before her. Through the

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figures of Nora and the grandmother – literary, historical and personal – the afterword evokes
connects South Korea’s colonial past to the novel’s postcolonial contemporary of the early
1990s.
Conclusion: Rewriting Political Subjects, Reading Worlds
This chapter has been an attempt to connect the theoretical and critical threads between
women’s writing, contemporary South Korean feminist cultures, and autotheoretical possibilities
in this dissertation’s archive. I have demonstrated the connection between the contemporary
feminist moment in South Korea with the re-reading of South Korean women’s texts about the
1990s, calling attention to the continuation of the feminist approach to the emotive and the
everyday as sites of resistance. Then I discussed varying theoretical approaches to women’s
writing from South Korean, French, and American contexts, proposing an approach to the
political possibilities of women’s writing that poses resonances between different fields and
locations. The connections made between emotion and women’s writing in this chapter
illuminate how the women’s texts in this dissertation unravel the understanding of national
history as a linear progressive timeline, positioning the feminine personal as the very site where
the political can be rediscovered in relation to a decade largely defined by the death of ideology,
the race for globalization, and the aftermaths of colonialism and state authoritarianism.
South Korean women’s literature and film ultimately unearths what testifies in these
aftermaths of official history. These texts interrogate the failure of modernity and democracy
from the everyday experiences of feminine life which are constitutive of postcolonial intimacies
which reveal “interruptive texts and textures that emerge from the accumulated everyday
experience of various forms of structural violence” (Antwi 2013, 5). A reexamination of

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women’s writing in relation to the postcolonial contemporary of the 1990s unearths archives of
feminist feeling that go askew from state and progressive cultures that were fixated on
revolutionary male rage during the 1980s and downtrodden patriarchs in the 1990s. In other
words, new emotions are rendered legible in these women’s texts, emotions that are rooted in
failure, ambivalence, opposition, and even repair, moving through scenes of feminine life that
recuperate the personal and the domestic as political sites of feeling. Whether it is the sadness
that arises in retrospective critiques of militarized modernity’s gender roles by a woman narrator
who refuses to grow up (The Bird’s Gift) or the fear of becoming homeless articulated as two
young women wander through the alleyways of a city (Take Care of My Cat), the emotions in
my archive of women’s texts ask how emotions of everyday feminine life rework South Korea’s
postcolonial political grammar. Such a reworking happens in the interrogation of the relationship
between acts of feeling and acts of truth-telling in these literary and visual representations.
Emotion, adjacent to the critical term “interiority” (naemyŏnsŏng) in 1990s South Korean
cultural criticism that relegated women’s texts to the realm of private life, troubles the boundary
between private and public, personal and political, complicity and resistance.
The girls and women in this dissertation’s archive are harmed often, whether by abusive
male kin (House of Hummingbird), the feminization of poverty in the 1990s and 2000s (Take
Care of My Cat, Mackerel), or patriarchal ideals of motherhood, marriage, and love originating
from the colonial period (Go Alone, The Bird’s Gift). None of the literature or film examined in
this dissertation guarantees repair or happiness; in fact, many of these works end in the
knowledge that things may never change for the better. However, girls and women emoting in
relation to their predicaments generate what Sara Ahmed has called “disturbance,” a feminist
phenomenon of refusing to assemble around conventional happiness (2010, 64) which in this

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case is the happiness that comes from heteronormative love, reproductive labor, and neoliberal
self-management.
As Sara Ahmed has written, emotions are integral to the politicization of subjects because
they can rewrite one’s coming into being as a political subject through how emotions involve
readings of the worlds one has inhabited (2014, 171). Ahmed notes how she can rewrite her
coming to being as a feminist subject in terms of different emotions. Recuperating emotion as a
feminist mode of reading the world is to address how the emotional and embodied aspects of
thought and reason have been concealed (Ahmed 2014, 170). Emotions provide the vocabulary
of politicization in South Korean women’s literature and film and it is through the disturbances
put forth by the depressive and errant feminine figures of this archive that embodied knowledge
becomes the starting point of femininst re-worlding. The emotive feminine in these texts points
to possibilities of imagining, living, and feeling otherwise to the continuing realities of modern
South Korean femininity as constitutive of unwaged and precarious labor and private as opposed
to public life by gesturing towards commons of girls and women feeling together, through
fictional representations as well as through reading practices in contemporary feminist criticism.

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Coda
Trinh T. Minh-ha has expressed in a recent interview that feminist inquiry hinges upon
questioning “the limit and the scope of your own role, your accountability, your daily activities
and the tools that define your creative work.” According to Trinh, any feminist project must
always come back to “the work itself” by situating its production processes “so that the critical
finger raised does not simply go to the other, but also comes back to oneself” (2022, 178). In
situating my project’s production processes, I must inevitably return to my own relationship with
my archive. During a standard day of work, feeling my legs go numb as I stare at the same few
pages, I try to find some sense of unity in the fragments that crowd my mind. A line from Annie
Ernaux’s A Woman’s Story – something about her mother’s death severing her from her
connection to her world. My grandmother’s gaze clouded by dementia, the terror and grief I felt
standing at the door of her cramped room. I am excited about what I could find in the text. And I
am tired of the phantom presences in my life that do not feel unrelated to the texts I read. At the
most difficult times, emancipatory visions of diaspora and femininity seem impossible as I work,
which heightens my desire for them. This coda is my own attempt to point my critical finger
back at myself and think through my own messy “outbursts” and “unheard-of songs” (Cixous
1976, 880) in relation to the work that I am doing.
In the Introduction to Touching Feeling, Eve Sedgwick writes, “In writing this book I’ve
continually felt pressed against the limits of my stupidity, even as I’ve felt the promising
closeness of transmissible gifts” (2003, 24). This sentence was the most precious fragment I
gleaned from Sedgwick’s book. It held me steady during my first few years of graduate school
when I felt incomparably stupid and depressed about the possibility of feminist reading and
writing in the academic spaces I traversed. The vital dynamic between limitation and promise (a

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dynamic that is consistently evoked in feminist and queer studies) has shaped my own approach
to reading and writing. I often think about Julietta Singh’s book Unthinking Mastery which
reminds us of the necessity of unthinking the mastery of disciplinary enclosures. In her book No
Archive Will Restore You (2018), Singh cites Antonio Gramsci: “The starting-point of critical
elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of
the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving
an inventory…. Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.”57
Compiling such an inventory, in my case, would be to trace my own emotional responses to the
texts I have been writing about.
The daily activities (to borrow from Trinh) that have shaped the creative work of this
dissertation have been performed mostly in isolation as I sit with the novels and films I have now
almost memorized. These texts have not been easy to sit with. Apart from the work of translating
Korean to English, the subject matter of my archive has, at times, felt more like a personal
burden than a distanced object of study. I have spent countless mornings and afternoons carrying
a vague sense of depression and doom, wondering belatedly if perhaps I was triggered, again, by
a description or image. Then I would feel guilty, wondering if I had the right to be triggered,
although many of the scenes I analyzed very closely mirrored my own experiences as well as the
experiences of other Korean women in my life. In retrospective, the guilt of feeling triggered was
a reflex borne from a self-imposed mandate to separate the “area” of study from the
embodiments of diaspora. And yet, gender travels through diaspora, and my emotional responses
to my archive as a diasporic Korean researcher comprise the silent second archive of this project.
Geeta Patel and Anjali Arondekar’s approach to the area as a translated, messy, postcolonial
57 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 324.

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form has transformed how I approach my archive. My role as the researcher is not that of an
informant, but that of a translator who is shaped by her own embodied archives.
To borrow from Sedgwick’s phrasing, I feel continually pressed against my own intimate
attachments to this archive. These attachments arise from wondering about the women in my
family, some who have never recovered from their depressive episodes as wives, mother, and
daughters. They were, in fact, depressed about being women, and many expressed
disidentification with what their gender was supposed to make them. Last summer in rural South
Korea, I was shown a photograph of two older relatives taken weeks after their marriage. He was
very short and thin, malnourished from war and sporting a military uniform, and she looked like
she was dreaming, staring to the side of the camera with eyes that, to my horror, closely
resembled mine. All I could think was, that is a very sad toy soldier and a beautiful artist who
will stay in the kitchen for most of her life, nursing the most explosive anger until the ability to
connect language to consciousness begins to fade. Over the years, I have become a repository of
other women’s emotions; sometimes I do not know the difference between what is mine and
what is theirs. These emotions rarely leave me during the work of research.
I remember staring at the cover of Go Alone years ago when I began my dissertation
research. It was the original cover from the 1990s. A speckled purple square served as the
backdrop of the white outline of a nude woman, slouching on what seemed to be the ground,
head tilted to the side. Her face was not visible. As I gazed at the nameless woman and her bare
back, legs, and buttocks, I thought, what else? There must be more than despair. As Gong Jiyoung has stated in an interview I cited in the first chapter, she very deliberately made Go Alone
about female despair. However, even as an early reader I was convinced that despair enabled
entry into a space that interrogated the conditions of that very despair. I was immediately

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attached to Hye-wan and Young-sun. I did not read them as women slouching towards an abyss,
but as thinkers who struggled to find an audience for their dense emotional ecologies.
Another episode from early on in my dissertation research involves a rare gathering of
Korean American women graduate students. Over lunch, one of the women asked, “Don’t you
think Koreans do domestic violence differently?” And we all laughed. The question did not even
make sense. Differently from what or whom? It was a very crude generalization, perhaps even
offensive. But we all laughed. I am not sure what emotion was generated in that space of
laughter, but it was far from defeat. It was an emotion borne from the culmination of what we
had lived, and it mocked the very conditions we had survived. It said, there’s more to this than
what happened, because I can manipulate the language of what happened to me. Looking back, I
wonder if that emotion was close to love for women who I barely knew but recognized in that
moment. We were all products of colonialism, war, migration, and patriarchal domestic relations,
raised on the strength and laments of mothers.
Even in the evocation of Koreanness, I felt little to no loyalty to being Korean in that
moment; we were drifting subjects with no national allegiance held together by laughter that
evaded uncomplicated happiness. We knew the nation would not protect us. We knew we were
invested in the people who made our work, indeed, our lives, possible. That day irrevocably
shaped how I think about my research by showing me what demands to be read in the constant
exchange between life and research, resisting transparent translation in spaces such as that of
ambivalent laughter. To return to Trinh T. Minh-ha, situating one’s production processes as a
researcher can be its own feminist practice and politics. In my case, these brief autotheoretical
reflections serve as an exercise in pointing the critical finger back to myself as I continue to work
through how textual representations of gender and emotion interact with life in the flesh.

143
I often return to the quote “My sadness was most definitely not a lie” (Gong 1993, 115),
in Go Alone Like the Rhinoceros’ Horn (Musoŭi ppulch'ŏrŏm honjasŏ kara, 1993) by Gong Jiyoung. I set the scene in my mind: a woman alone in a dark apartment in 1990s Seoul, struggling
to write her novel, at a loss as to how to support herself and her depressed friends. Even in the
relatively quiet and subdued scenes in the novel, the specter of death is hard to ignore; the text is
haunted by literal scars from a woman’s suicide attempt, and the invisible wounds of everyday
women who are denigrated for feeling excessively. “My sadness was most definitely not a lie”
performs a quiet testimony in the face of no formal audience and hardly any fellow feeling or
sympathy. The emotion of sadness becomes a means of positing another truth in an environment
in which redress or justice seems impossible. Sadness is rendered real because it is a source of
information that connects one woman to others, condemning their shared experiences of
marriage and domesticity. One woman’s declaration of sadness gestures towards emergent
possibilities of rendering real the embodied knowledges of those who find themselves on the
margins of political change. What changes could we theorize if we did not abandon “bad”
political objects in texts? How can we read errant, disaffected, and depressive modes of
representing the feminine to rethink what resistance can look like in literature and film?
This coda has been an exercise in what Amber Jamilla Musser calls “situatedness” or
“highlighting the imbrication of bodily knowledge with positionality and attachment” as well as
“the political importance of difference” (2024, 8). My bodily sensations and reactions upon
reading Gong Ji-young, Eun Hee-kyung, Jeong Jae-eun, and Kim Bora have changed the ways I
approach academic work and my place in this world as a Korean American scholar artist. I have
been reminded that texts have their own historical constraints and contexts, and must be read in
relation to them, as well as in relation to the body of the diasporic researcher which creates its

144
own archive through the scenes and passages it collects. Writing from an era of the global
pandemic in which femicides and mass death have become commonplace, I have worked
through my own intellectual and political despair alongside these texts. In textual details of
depression, disaffection, and errantry – a schoolgirl suspended above a trampoline in green
afternoon light, a densely critical gaze that theorizes the politics of national time through vermin
– I have gleaned new “strategies for thinking and being otherwise” (Musser 20204, 14).
Chŏng Go-ŭn (2017) has written about South Korean women’s reading and writing
cultures in the 2010s, with attention to the Gangnam Station femicide and the ensuing online
feminist activism intimately connected to reading and writing. She elaborates on how language
through literature has become a means of fighting for contemporary Korean feminists.58 This has
been the case for film, as well, with the critical success of films such as House of Hummingbird
prompting new critiques in South Korean feminist circles. Continuing my research in South
Korean women’s literature and film has been a project of contributing to this language while
situating my own transpacific production processes, asking what it means to create in the face of
political disappointment and despair.
58 Chŏng, “2015~2016nyŏn p'eminijŭm ch'ulp'an/toksŏ yangsanggwa ŭimi,” 187.

145
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Creator Cho, Hayun (author)

Core Title Testimonial emotions: witnessing and feeling the 1990s in South Korean women's literature and film

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program East Asian Languages and Cultures

Degree Conferral Date 2024-08

Publication Date 06/25/2024

Defense Date 05/31/2024

Publisher Los Angeles, California (original), University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag affect,emotion,feminism,OAI-PMH Harvest,South Korea,testimony,women's film,women's literature

Format theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Park, Sunyoung (committee chair), Bernards, Brian (committee member), Choe, Youngmin (committee member), Khanna, Neetu (committee member)

Creator Email chohayun@gmail.com,hayuncho@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC1139970H1

Unique identifier UC1139970H1

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Legacy Identifier etd-ChoHayun-13145

Document Type Dissertation

Format theses (aat)

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